


At Long Last

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Eventual Smut, Grim Reapers, M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pining Lance (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-06 03:46:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 66,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16380779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: When Lance wakes up with no recollection of who he must have been in life, he’s tasked with the job of transporting the souls of the recently deceased to the other side. And as though all of this wasn’t complicated enough, he’s partnered with a prickly, yet beautiful high-ranking reaper who forces Lance to question if life didn’t even begin for him until the day that he died.





	1. Pendulum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [googlyeyeseyes123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/googlyeyeseyes123/gifts).



> Gifted to [Mai](http://googlyeyeseyes123.tumblr.com) for the [Keith Birthday Exchange](http://keith-birthday-exchange.tumblr.com/)!  
> A special thanks to [Epi](http://epiproctan.tumblr.com) and [Traffy](http://oneyedkaneking.tumblr.com) for taking the time to beta this story for me!

Life, for Lance, was like the echoed crack of two fingers snapping together. It was like a lightbulb once the switch is flipped—there, for one moment, then gone. Instantaneous. Extinguished before he really got a chance to grow accustomed to it.

He remembers waking up and feeling as though there was something that he must have forgotten. He remembers sitting at the end of a long table with only one other inhabitant far across from him. The lights were bright and the glow of them bounced off of the polished silverware set around an empty plate in front of him. The rattling of something just outside of the window jostled the porcelain tea set and the empty gravy bowl—the lids resting over wide platters and the bells over serving dishes clattering around noisily as Lance marveled at the set up there, as though someone was planning a grand feast.

His stomach didn’t growl at the suggestion of dinner. He realized, abruptly, that he didn’t feel tired or hungry or frankly anything at all.

He felt as though he was floating in that moment, hovering just above the chair where he sat. It was a glossy, dark oak fastened with a plush seat. It looked like something out of an old movie that Lance couldn’t think of the name of right then.

The chandelier overhead glistened, light bouncing around as the room shook, as the crystals dangling from the metal halo of it jittered precariously. The china on the table looked smooth and cool, expensive. Painted delicately on the sides were flowers—matching, but all subtly different, as though they’d been crafted by hand.

He was curious, as he gazed around the room where he woke up, but he hadn’t touched anything. He hadn’t moved or spoken or taken a moment to consider why he still felt as though something very important had just flitted out of his thoughts. In the train carriage where he sat, in this curious dining room with only a figure obscured by the bright lights shining down between them—he’d wondered if this was commonplace in a life that he must have lived just briefly before it.

He remembered that he was dead, and it didn’t feel like anything. It was as casual and blithe a realization as noting the clear blue sky through the window, or the fat, fluffy white clouds. He was dead, and he couldn’t remember anything about himself but his name. And it didn’t make him sad, or angry. He didn’t feel afraid, and he didn’t wonder why.

He knew that he didn’t recognize the train carriage where he sat then. He knew that there should have been food under the bells of the platters, drinks in the glasses, gravy and sugar and salt in the boats that sat hollow and clanking on the lacy tablecloth before him. He knew that he must have been someone before he woke up there and that whoever sat across from him, they were important. And he needed to listen to whatever they said to him.

He felt it as more of an instinct than a cohesive thought. He felt it like a moth might feel the urge to chase a flame, as a wild creature might bay at the moon at night.

He knew, too, that he must have sat down at some point. He must have just moments ago been a person who walked into the carriage willingly and took a seat. But he wasn’t familiar with that version of himself anymore, and somehow, for some reason, the thought of changing so profoundly in such a short amount of time didn’t bother him.

For all intents and purposes, he’d seemed as though he’d just forgotten who he was, the moment he’d sat down in that chair. Or he’d simply awoken that way—conjured up as a fully grown person, already injected with all of the worldly knowledge and life experience that anyone else might have had to have lived in the living world in order to obtain.

Fabricated or not, Lance knew a total of three things about himself when he awoke:

His name was Lance. He was twenty-three years old. And he was dead.

And it seemed, as the person across from that vast table lifted a single teaspoon and tapped it against the china, that maybe those three things were the only pieces of information that he’d ever needed to know after all.

They seemed to be shrouded in a mist, of sorts. When he looked at them, his gaze grew blurry and unclear, spotted as though he was squinting up at the sun. They were dressed in immaculate white. Over their face, they wore a long, lacy veil. The fingers around the teaspoon were long and nimble, a soft-looking shade of brown that reminded Lance of coffee with cream, of tiger’s eye, of tanned bodies spread out on vast beaches that rang about in his memories so loudly that he forced himself to look away.

The figure’s long, glossy nails were painted white, as well. The index finger tapped against the edge of the spoon, before swirling it in the empty cup, as though mixing honey in tea.

They hadn’t spoken in words. He’d never managed to catch a glimpse of their face. But something had urged him from inside of his head to drink from the empty teacup rattling around on the table with seemingly growing urgency as the train moved forward around him. Something warned him that he was running out of time.

Death, he’d learned, is disorienting. Death isn’t programmed to make any more sense than life did. Or, at least, he’d assumed. He’d felt inside that maybe the life that he’d left behind on Earth had been sometimes confusing as well. He’d wondered if maybe things here were more outlandish, or if maybe things just seemed abnormal because they were the first things that he actually remembered.

As a baby opening his eyes for the first time on Earth, maybe he’d been befuddled too. He couldn’t remember it then. He couldn’t remember being introduced to the world as a child. He didn’t know if he was smart, or brave, or if he’d taken the idiosyncrasies of that universe with any more finesse than he’d handled his rebirth.

But he’d taken that cup, made a show out of sipping the empty air.

They’d drawn closer and closer to whichever destination the train was charging towards, and a moment later, when he blinked, he was gone.

And the rest, by now, might as well be ancient history.

His first few hours of reborn existence passed in nothing but an indecipherable blur. He’d awoken once again in a more stable room, away from clambering confusion of that train. It was a small, dark room—lit with a golden hue as though the single bulb swaying overhead had been tinted yellow. And it lit the shiny edges of hundreds of rhythmically ticking clocks, stacked together on every surface, hanging from long, golden chains from the ceiling and even jostling at Lance’s feet as he stumbled forward.

The room was closet-sized, at best, barely big enough for Lance to move about comfortably. In the corner was a desk lacquered with chipping white paint. It, too, was piled with clocks, and underneath the clocks, were stacks of messy paperwork and nearly a dozen fine tools that Lance couldn’t categorize even if he wanted to.

The floor beneath his feet was hardwood that creaked as his weight displaced on top of it. The light continued to swing, as though propelled forward and back by a phantom hand. A sense of vertigo overtook Lance, and he clutched tightly at his belly with both arms wrapped around himself. He was dressed in a suit that he didn’t recognize, suddenly, and he couldn’t remember if he was wearing it back on the train or not.

He looked as though he was ready to attend an office job more than a funeral. His hair, when he reached up to comb his fingers through it, had been slicked smartly back.

He didn’t remember stopping for a makeover, but he wondered if maybe the change of appearance was the least of his worries as another person suddenly leaped forward at him from out of one of the shadowed corners of the room.

Lance hadn’t even been given the opportunity to raise his hands in a defensive position. And he definitely didn’t remember if he’d ever learned how to fight.

The man had him by the shoulders, a broad, toothy smile wrinkling the aged corners of his lips. Lance felt as though his heart had been lodged high up in his throat. He felt as though, at any moment, he was going to lurch upward, yelling madly as he awoke from this terrible dream.

The man was dressed in a tasteful suit as well, sans the jacket. But he’d also accessorized this look with suspenders strapped over his wide shoulders, a bright orange and yellow spotted bow tie popping against the otherwise monochrome shades of his outfit. There was a coffee stain faded in the collar of his shirt. His sleeves were wrinkled as though he’d just recently unrolled them after pushing them up.

His eyes, a violet shade of blue, were wide and wild, nearly frenzied. His voice boomed around them, as though it was a physical entity, as though it might have been water that could fill the fishbowl of the room and drown both of them.

“My boy,” the man had announced, obviously thrilled, so much louder than Lance had thought that he had to be in such a small room with no other people around, “You picked the right path, I’ll tell you that! It’s been ages since anyone has drunk the tea!”

None of it made even an ounce of sense, but Lance, still learning to walk on new legs, still bewildered by the first brush that he would have in a long series with that mysterious, white figure at the end of the train car, couldn’t find the will to speak.

“Coran, the  _ Coranic Mechanic _ , at your service!” The man had taken his hand and shaken it nearly a dozen times, enough times that his shoulder started to feel tired and he’d lost feeling in all five of his fingers. “I’m the picker of the tickers when they stop tick-ticking!”

Lance had decided that he must have been having a fever dream. He’d decided that, soon enough, he would wake up, delirious, and he’d forget this exhaustion-fueled fantasy. He’d continue on with whatever life he’d lived before it. He’d put this behind him, decide to switch from whatever energy drink he must have downed while he was studying—or partying, or watching movies late at night before he’d passed out—to something that wouldn’t mess with his brain to this ridiculous extreme. He’d make the newly-enlightened decision not to watch Alice in Wonderland anymore. Or any other Disney movies that involved one very normal person falling down a rabbit hole into absolute chaos.

But he would learn, in time, that “The Picker of the Tickers” was not a real job title, and Coran thought that he was very clever and very funny, but he hadn’t interacted with a freshly-killed human in a long, long time. That might have been one of the first things that Keith had told him, actually, if he’d been able to focus long enough on the words coming out of Keith’s mouth and wasted less time pondering just how someone so beautiful could have such a nasty attitude.

And maybe Keith had warned him not to get Coran going about those tickers, as well. Maybe he’d told Lance to keep his nose clean around the office and only speak to the people who it would prove absolutely necessary to interact with. Keith was pragmatic when it came to his personal connections with their co-workers, and Lance would come to learn eventually that maybe that really was the best way to be.

But Keith hadn’t fallen from the heavens and taken residence as an angel in reaper’s skin just yet. Lance was left alone with an excited Coran in a cramped office, shaking his hand, listening to speeches that made less sense than they probably would have had anyone else been explaining things.

And he wouldn’t learn his lesson that day anyway. He wouldn’t listen to Keith’s warning even after enough time had passed and he’d regained his bearings long enough to allow those words to sink in.

He would soon learn another very important lesson about the person who he might have once been, but definitely about the person who he would eventually become:

He wasn’t very good at paying attention to the important things when they were being explained to him by very pretty people.

Or, perhaps, that was just his curse with Keith.

But now, he’s getting ahead of himself. He’s thinking about his origin story far too soon after he’s broken away from it and crashed into whatever part of the prose this debacle could possibly be considered.

If he backs up a ways—if he goes back to that moment in time, when Coran had vigorously shaken his hand and spat just about as much gibberish at him as his brain could possibly handle, he could recall that, soon enough, Coran had finally finished that vague semblance of an introduction. He hadn’t explained what the clocks were for, or why he’d been tasked with picking them. He hadn’t even told Lance why he’d suddenly woken up there, why he couldn’t remember anything, and why drinking imaginary tea out of an empty cup had been the right decision to make.

But, after a moment, he’d straightened up and pulled his hand away from Lance’s. He’d turned his back for a split second, fumbling around on the cluttered surface of the desk,  procuring a plain, manilla folder. He’d licked a single finger, thumbing through it with the appropriate  _ oohs _ and  _ ahs _ at intervals that Lance had thought sounded just a tad rehearsed.

And after a moment, he’d tucked it under one arm, swiveling back towards Lance on his heel and drawing in a deep breath before speaking again.

“Lance,” he’d said, his voice even enough that Lance was almost foolish enough to convince himself that the theatrics were done and over with, “As you’ve probably figured out by now, you are dead. But death is not the end—oh no, not for you, my dear boy! For you, death is only the beginning!”

He’d wagged a finger in front of him, raising it higher in the air to punctuate the end of that sentence.

Lance would learn over time that everything that Coran said sounded as though he was reading it out of some kind of fantasy novel. As though, at the beginning of the day, he’d somehow manage to log every encounter that he hadn’t even had yet and written all of the appropriate witty dialogs that he’d need in response to any given situation.

Coran spoke with the enthusiasm of an actor auditioning for a play. He spoke loudly and proudly, chest out, back straight, booming words that wiggled the neatly-combed hairs of his ridiculous curled mustache as though it, too, were all a part of his act.

Coran to an unfamiliar, tender-footed Lance was enough to drain the residual energy from just about all of his tanks. Coran, in all of his gusto, felt as though he’d drained every ounce of vivacity from the room.

Lance, before him, was akin to a wet, rubbery noodle. It took a profound amount of inner strength to listen to him bluster his way through yet another windy speech without falling to the floor and wrapping around himself in a defensive fetal position.

“Some of these lazy souls, they decide to go on and retire after their time is up—what’s the big deal, right? Someone else will pick up the slack. Someone else will work hard so the rest of us can relax, but you—oh, my boy, you have chosen the righteous path, my friend. Our offices are already pulled so thin, and I know just the place to put you!”

He’d collected enough information within the five-minute span of their conversation to understand that Coran was in charge of this place to some degree. He’d wondered, idly, if he was the after-death equivalent of a supervisor. He never would have imagined that he was actually right.

He’d been led then from the tiny clock-filled room, out through the door and into a brightly-lit, bustling hallway. He’d nearly been run into three times as Coran pulled him through groups of chatting, busy people towards another door near the end of the hall. The door itself was a heavy, red oak, and every single one along the way, just like it, seemed to be fastened with a weighty, solid gold knocker. He’d wondered if those things were just for the aesthetic, or if they served a greater purpose.

He’d wondered if anything here was actually required to do whatever job needed to be done, or if this whole introduction was just a show that they were putting on in order to confuse and exhaust him.

Lance had almost slammed into Coran’s back when he’d stopped abruptly in front of the final door, just at the end of the hall. He’d stopped himself just in time, nearly tripping in place and peeking around in embarrassment to see if anyone had witnessed it. Everyone around them seemed too busy to pay attention. There had been so many bodies speeding around each other, pushing through tight halls with high ceilings, shoving through heavy doors. He’d felt as though he was drowning in a sea of people. It had been pure sensory overload then, and the urge to tuck himself on the floor and rock back and forth had returned to him tenfold.

Instead, he focused his attention back on Coran in front of him. He’d grasped the golden knocker and he’d rapped it three times in slow succession. He’d turned to Lance and winked, moved his mouth in a way that wiggled his ridiculous curly mustache.

He’d told Lance something then that would stick with him for the rest of his eternity in this in-between world—

“You work for yourself when you’re living, my boy, but when you’re dead… you just work for other people.”

It might have been a passing moment of clarity among Coran’s usual cabin-fever-craze. It might have been just another borderline incoherent, mad-hatter-esque one-liner that Lance had just happened to find actually resonated with him.

But he hadn’t had a moment to ponder just how profound it was until later on—because suddenly the door in front of them had creaked open, despite Lance’s astonished discovery a moment later that no one had been behind it to pull the handle. And the office inside was barren, less whimsical than the rest of this place that Lance had seen so far. It was white carpet and plain, cream walls. Two plush chairs in front of a modest wooden desk, and a wide window obscured by twin, off-brown curtains. There was a tall, potted fern collecting dust in the corner, a bookshelf lined with leather books, all labeled with a long series of numbers engraved in gold. It reminded Lance of something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on—something that he must have lived when he was alive. Something stuffy and unpleasant, something that crawled uncomfortably under his skin.

He felt claustrophobic in that room, but that room was the very place where he would finally meet the man who possessed his afterlife so completely, who gave him new meaning. Who made him feel like his long-stilled heart actually had the capability of thumping relentlessly in his chest.

He’d had a feeling, when Keith had risen from where he’d been collecting something from the bottom drawer of his desk, that he’d never fallen in love with anyone in the mortal realm. He’d felt the inkling of something flittering within his rib cage, bubbling in his belly, heating his cheeks.

This had to have been the first time. Even with his sudden, supernatural amnesia, he felt a sense that he was experiencing something wonderful and unique, something Earth-shattering and new, and terrifying, and intoxicating.

Keith didn’t smile, and he didn’t even greet them. A frown had tugged his lips further down when he’d spotted Coran waving in front of him. He was dressed in nothing spectacular—just a depressing black and white business suit, like a funeral director. He looked somehow even more depressing than the bland, airless room around them.

But he was beautiful. His sour expression, the boring clothes that he wore—they couldn’t mask his high cheekbones or the fullness of his lips. They couldn’t hide those gorgeous, deep dark eyes. The paleness of his perfect skin—sans a mysterious, pink burn, striped just under his right eye. The long, silky mop of hair that framed his face so perfectly, the straight, white teeth that peeked out when he finally opened his mouth to speak.

“I’m not sharing my office, go bother Shiro instead.”

Lance couldn’t quite comprehend what he was saying, but Coran deflated visibly for a fraction of a second. Lance’s head was too busy floating in the clouds—imagining what it might feel like to be able to see this angel every single day.

Because he’d understood with absolute clarity that he was dead. He’d known that his newfound amnesia could only be a side effect of whatever happens after life has ended. It must have had something to do with that empty teacup, must have had something to do with that mysterious white figure sitting silently at the end of that broad table—but he didn’t care about any of that in the moment.

He just wanted to get to know this person, this gorgeous man, who took residence in such a boring room. Who seemed as though he had absolutely no idea how beautiful and bright he really was.

“Keith, please,” Coran had interjected, disappointed even as Lance felt the rush of ocean waves to shore, the rising of the sun in a bleak and colorless sky, the stars aligning to craft a constellation of this muse’s name in his thoughts— _ Keith _ . Keith, the name of the most perfect, most stunning creature to ever grace unworthy men with his heavenly presence, to ever illuminate the dark caverns of an undeserving world with his resounding light.

Lance imagined that a chorus of angels must have been singing every time that Keith opened his mouth to speak. He imagined a halo made of gold glitter sparkling in the fluorescent lights just above Keith’s wild mop of hair.

Coran and this cherubic, ethereal being argued for quite some time, but Lance lost himself in his thoughts. He found himself admiring the way that the man’s thick brows bowed in the middle as he rattled off whichever rebuttal he could think of—how his full lips pursed in a scowl, how his cheeks splashed with the most charming shades of pink when he caught Lance’s eyes—

Wait, wait no. Shit.

He’d hurriedly snapped his gaze away. His face felt then as though it was on fire. His rubbery limbs had screamed with the urge to turn heel and flee, but he didn’t know where he would go, what he would do if he actually had the courage to bound out of the room.

Keith had drawn in a deep breath, prodding his temples with both index fingers before dropping his face into his hands. His elbows on the desk slid slightly, dragging the papers beneath them and jostling the steaming mug of black coffee that sat further near the edge.

Lance could barely make out the letters scrawled on the papers, and he squinted, struggling to make sense of the words that he could see around Keith’s arms. It seemed to be some kind of accident report, and he’d wondered, dread rising in his chest, what sorts of terrible things were bound to happen in a disorienting place like this.

“You know what?” Keith had spat, turning those dark eyes to Coran through the cage of his fingers, “Fine.  _ Fine _ , just—just move a desk in here for him, I don’t care. I don’t have time for this.”

He’d sent Lance a fiery look, sharp enough to pierce straight through him. Hard enough to pin him in place, and to momentarily ground him where he’d felt as though he’d been floating just moments before.

“Don’t make me regret this, intern,” Keith had said then, wild like a caged tiger, coiled and ready to strike, “Get your work done. Don’t bother me.  _ Don’t make my job harder _ .”

And that was how the first day of Lance’s death had ended:

With himself and a winded Coran shuffling about like idiots, hauling a desk that he’d been determined at the time would not fit through the office door no matter how many times they’d rearranged it.

Keith had ignored them dutifully at his desk. He’d filled out paperwork as though the two of them weren’t huffing and puffing and nearly breaking their backs just a few feet away. He’d ignored Lance at the apparent end of their shift. He’d scoffed when Lance had waved goodbye, fumbling through a clumsy, “Have a good night” that had sounded more like  _ “Have a goo newt” _ even in Lance’s own ears.

He’d retired that night into a dorm room just a few halls away from the general worksite. It was a small, single-room area that felt nostalgic to Lance in a way that he didn’t have the memories required to understand. But he’d shuffled behind Coran nervously with the bundle of supplies that they’d collected from a closet along the way held close to his chest. It wasn’t anything but a blanket, a toothbrush, and a few random toiletries, but it felt nice to own something—to feel as though these things should have been familiar even when he didn’t remember if he’d brushed his teeth or taken a shower in life.

He’d retained only the knowledge of earthly possessions, but never of actually possessing them. It felt strange, realizing that he could recognize the slab of thin mattress and scratchy comforter as a bed, or the swaying, flickering bulb above it as a light—but he couldn’t remember if he’d ever had anything better. He had no experience with these things anymore, but the muscle memory to use them, and a textbook-level knowledge of how everything worked.

He marveled at the amount of knowledge that he actually retained in his memories. Four walls, a room. A bed, a floor. A digital clock on a nightstand. A blanket, a dresser, a rack already holding a small assortment of outfits.

He resisted the urge to touch everything. When he was alone and no one was around to judge him, his resolve wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds.

Coran wished him goodnight with a tired, friendly smile, and a hand placed gently on his bedroom door. He took up nearly half of the space that made up Lance’s new home. They were cramped and too close together, but Lance found himself wishing that Coran wouldn’t go. Where he would stay, Lance wasn’t sure, but after so much excitement and confusion, he found that he really didn’t want to be alone.

But Coran winked at him, and his mustache wiggled as he smiled. His eyes seemed to twinkle in the orange glow of Lance’s new bedroom’s light, and when he stepped back out into the hall, he said only, “It gets easier, Lance. I promise, with time, everything gets a lot easier.”

Then, just as suddenly as he’d seemed to have crashed into Lance’s life, for the night, he was gone.

And Lance was left alone in a silent room to piece together everything that he’d learned during his first brief day in the afterlife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, Mai! I got you in the exchange, haha! What a weird turn of events, right? It’s been so, SO hard not to tell you over the last couple of months that I’ve been working on this story for you, and frankly I’m amazed that I managed to be as subtle as I was. But this is a story that was written with a lot of love for you and I’m so very thankful that I was given the opportunity to write this.  
> With that being said, this story is going to be updated every day until it’s done! Just so I can keep the posting schedule within the timeframe that the exchange allowed us. So for the next ten days, I really hope that you enjoy this! I’ll see you again tomorrow!  
> Thank you so much for reading! <3


	2. Kintsugi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Kintsugi** : Also known as 金継ぎ or “Golden Joinery”. A Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold-infused lacquer.

It’s been three weeks since the very first day that Lance unwittingly stumbled into the afterlife. And Lance has found, despite how much he might not have believed him at first, that Coran was actually right. The days have trickled by slower than they might have back on Earth. He gets the feeling that time moves at a different pace here, but he has no foundation to support those suspicions just yet.

He’s been running paperwork from Keith’s office to different rooms about the building. Keith had delegated small tasks to him at first: delivery of important documents, runnings errands around the office, and finally, filling out paperwork that isn’t so classified that he needs a special title to do so. It’s mundane work, for the most part, and it’s taken him a while to understand all of the jargon that they use on the sheets. But he thinks that he’s starting to get the hang of it, and perhaps he’s even beginning to form a more cohesive picture of what the employees around him actually do.

He’s learned that Coran’s job is actually not quite as outlandish as he might have originally assumed. To some degree, he understands that Coran helps select the souls that will pass on to the afterlife, but he doesn’t think that it’s so simple, either. He knows that there are more pencil-pushers like Keith occupying offices all along this hall and that they aren’t just doing desk work all the time, even if he has no idea what they actually do when they’re “out on the field”.

He’s learned that this building is really all that there is to this world. There’s no view outside of the windows, and the swirling fog beyond the glass never subsides. He’s learned that food can still smell good even if he’s never actually hungry. He’s learned that he can be tired, and cranky, and completely burned out after a long day’s work.

And he’s learned that Keith gets only more beautiful and more prickly as the weeks drag on.

He doesn’t talk to Lance very often, aside from ordering for him to complete some new task or correcting any of the mistakes that he’s made while filling out the documents. He leaves each evening without offering a “good night”, and without responding when Lance gathers the courage to say those words to him instead. He spends most of his time at his desk, never seeming as though he’s slept enough to focus on whatever blanks he’s filling out on the pages.

And when he leaves, two or three times during the day, it feels so quiet and motionless in the room around Lance that he feels as though he’s suffocating, as though Keith took all of the air out with him.

Coran comes in often to drop off paperwork that Keith accepts with a scowl. And for hours and hours throughout the day, he disappears into a small closet at the corner of his room. He’d told Lance the first time that he used it, _ “Don’t you dare open that door” _ and Lance, ever-dutifully, has managed to heed that warning despite how curious he might be.

He’s heard rumbles from behind it, heard something akin to scratching and clawing against the other side of the wood. But he’s never allowed temptation to get the better of him. He’s kept focused on the paperwork that Keith has left behind. He still has trouble with some of the terms. He still can’t totally grasp exactly why they’re obligated to do so much paperwork in death, but he distracts himself with the tediousness of this job.

Sometimes he rearranges the pencil cup, the paper holder, and the placard on his desk. Sometimes he taps out made-up beats with the tip of his pen against the wood.

Sometimes he kicks back and stares up at the ceiling, and sometimes he wanders over to the window to admire the rolling of gray fog, forever writhing, thick and impenetrable, as far as his eyes can reach.

He waits around like a sad, lost puppy when Keith goes away. And when Keith comes back, he revels in even the smallest nod of his head in his direction, or the subtle upturning of his lips when Lance tells him that he’s finished all of his work.

On slow days, sometimes, Keith gets coffee. He drinks it black, and he allows it to sit on the corner of his desk until it’s nearly cold. The steam stops rising, the cup, Lance has checked, is tepid to the touch. But Keith becomes so engrossed in his work that he sometimes forgets about it completely.

He makes a face when he reaches for the mug and cold coffee meets his lips. Lance has cataloged that as well—the funny way that he’s so private about his distaste. The small range of emotions that flit across his features when he thinks that no one is paying attention.

Keith spends a lot of time working, and at the end of the night, he doesn’t stretch out his sore muscles until he’s rounded the corner of the hall. Lance has caught him a few times doing just that, on nights when he’s collected his things faster than usual when he’s caught up behind Keith without realizing that he’s about to stumble in on some private ritual. It’s as though he doesn’t want to show even a shred of weakness. It’s as though he believes that Lance might think less of him if he were to figure out that his muscles get tired too.

Keith only eats food from the vending machines, never the mess hall. There’s an endless selection of snacks in the cafe: from pastries to eggs and bacon. From steak dinners to ice cream, to soufflés. But Keith’s meals at work come wrapped in plastic and refrigerated. Sometimes he’ll sink his teeth into a protein bar. Sometimes—Lance thinks that he might consider this to be splurging—he’ll get himself a salad with all of the dressings. He’ll stab his fork into the tomato and the egg, the little shreds of carrots, the spinach and kale, and everything that he can fit on one small piece of plastic. And he’ll shove the whole thing into his mouth at once. His cheeks will be puffed out like a hamster’s. He’ll turn in his chair so that his face is out of Lance’s view. And Lance, privately, will smother the laughter that threatens to rise like bubbles in his chest.

He pretends that he doesn’t notice a lot of things with Keith.

And Keith, in return, brings him offerings of hot coffee.

The first time that he’d handed Lance a cup and Lance had taken a careful sip just to be polite, he’d pretended that he didn’t notice the grimace on Lance’s face when he’d tasted just how bitter it was. Lance imagines that maybe he only liked sweet things in life. He imagines that he probably never had much of an affinity for bitter things like coffee at all.

He’d suffered through that mug just to show Keith that he wasn’t intending to turn down the first act of kindness that Keith had extended to him. It was a white flag of surrender dipped in acidic arsenic. It was an olive branch littered with sharp thorns.

But Keith, surely, hadn’t anticipated that Lance would dislike it. He’d even went through the trouble of adding cream and sugar, despite the fact that he never flavored his own. It had felt like the horrible torture of first love. Every sip warmed him just after the nasty hints of it faded from his tongue. Every drink reminded him, first, that being more awake was not worth drinking this liquid garbage—but then that Keith had gone through some level of inconvenience for him, to make him happy.

And that realization was enough to make him feel as though he was floating in the clouds for the rest of their shift.

The next time, just a few days later, when Keith brought him another cup, he’d pretended to drink it throughout the day. But the moment that Keith left on another closet job, he’d leaned over the edge of his desk and dumped the contents of it in the unfortunate, unassuming fern that sat tall and proud and so undeserving just a little ways away.

But today is not a coffee day. Today isn’t even a lunch break day. And it’s not like they even need to eat anyway, but Coran has told him frequently that going through the motions of humanity allows them to continue  _ understanding  _ humanity. He claims that he’s been dead now for hundreds of years. He brags about how in touch he is with the humans—how he could conceivably go back to the living realm and fit in perfectly among the living folk—but when he does so, he pulls on the straps of his suspenders, wiggling his mustache and swaying about in a very outlandish and positively _ inhuman _ manner. Lance doesn’t tell him that he’d stand out like a sore thumb. Coran is one of his few friends that he’s managed to make here this whole time, and he isn’t willing to jeopardize that friendship just because the guy is so out of touch that he can’t even comprehend how out of touch he really is.

Along with Coran, Lance has managed to meet a few people who someday, if he plays his cards right, might even be considered friends.

There’s Shiro, who visits the office often to check up on Keith. He’s a tall and handsome man who Lance couldn’t put an age or a decade on even if he tried. Shiro is shockingly normal. He’s kind and sometimes he’s funny, and he’s always in a chipper mood. His personality juxtaposes Keith’s to such a severe degree that Lance is often surprised that Keith doesn’t hate him, doesn’t roll his eyes when Shiro enters the office in the same way that he does with everyone else, but they seem to be on good terms. Shiro, Lance learns quickly, is one of the few people who Keith actually likes.

As far as where he, personally, falls on that spectrum with Keith, he still isn’t entirely sure.

But Shiro is friendly, and he always acts as though he’s interested in what Lance has to say. He’s a familiar face that Lance is relieved to see during their busy days, and he’s nice to talk to during the brief moments in which Lance ducks into the break room to grab a snack.

Then there’s Hunk. He’s friendly, too, but maybe not in the same way as Shiro. He seems fretful more times than not—nervous about something mundane each time that Lance speaks with him. He occupies the dorm directly next to Lance’s, and sometimes, late at night, Lance can hear him tinkering with something and cursing in frustration through the walls.

They’ve talked often about Hunk’s job building the tickers, which everyone here seems determined to keep calling them, as opposed to  _ clocks, _ which Lance knows that they actually are. He’s still unsure about that one, but he’s too afraid to ask. And Hunk is very passionate about the tickers. Lance knows that he’d be hurt if someone referred to them as anything inferior. He knows that Hunk considers his job to be gravely important, and perhaps it is. Perhaps, someday, Lance will figure out all of the mysterious secrets hiding in plain sight around this place, and he’ll finally understand why building clocks is apparently a very special job.

For the time being, he tries his best to offer supportive advice. Hunk complains about various jobs, about the tiny, easily breakable tools that he’s expected to use. About how often his hard work amounts to nothing. About the petty arguments that he gets into with his coworker, using scientific language and professional terminology that makes Lance feel dizzy when he even tries to understand it.

Hunk refers to the White Hooded Figure from the train carriage often. He tells Lance all about how they visit his office to select which tickers will be released into the world, and at which times a new soul will be born. He complains that he’ll create something beautiful—a healthy, robust ticker that could potentially run for the entire span of a human life, and he says that, frequently, she’ll pass over it for something weaker. Something that might not even last longer than a week.

“She’s really picky about which ones she wants in the world,” Hunk tells him, “I guess I’m not God, so I can’t really argue with her, but… but what’s really the point of taking a ticker out there only to have it break like two minutes later? I mean, how long did yours last, like… eighteen, nineteen years? I made one the other day that could have lasted to a hundred!”

Lance had felt his thoughts swirling with entirely too much information, but he’d nodded his head at the correct intervals, pretended that he understood entirely for the sake of not having to hear more about all of this than he absolutely had to.

He hadn’t taken a moment to consider God or heaven. He’d wondered if he was religious while he was alive. And he’d remembered his brief encounter with that figure on the train—how they’d tapped their glossy nails against the teaspoon, how they’d compelled him to make the biggest decision of his afterlife without speaking any words at all.

Hunk could be difficult to talk to sometimes, if only because he didn’t understand how little Lance really knew about their world. He was kind and apologetic when he realized it, when Lance became so lightheaded with information overload that he dithered in their conversations. But Hunk was a reminder that Lance was still a baby bird. He was still wet behind the ears, still grappling to grab hold of anything solid in this world so he could finally start to grow here.

Shiro, at least, is a lot easier. And Shiro often comes with donuts. He enters the office at the beginning of every shift, bringing his glazed peace offerings and sending Lance nothing short of the kindest, most handsome smile that Lance thinks could possibly exist on a human face.

He’s something of a movie star, something like a model. A lot of women around the office gossip about Shiro’s good looks. A lot of people talk about him as though he’s the most eligible bachelor that the afterlife has ever seen. Lance is charmed by Shiro’s good looks and charisma to some degree, but he finds that he doesn’t understand a lot of the hubbub. Shiro is a nice person, and it feels sometimes as though Lance is in a spotlight when he looks at him. But Shiro intimidates him, too. And Shiro never talks about anything but work.

Shiro, he can tell, really only feels comfortable around Keith.

Shiro’s right arm, Lance has noticed, is striped with a sparkling, golden line. Lance has caught sight of it when he’s worn shirts with short enough sleeves to show off those hulking biceps. Keith has caught him staring at it many times, but he only scowls, only allows his features to fall into a somehow more unpleasant arrangement than before. He berates Lance with that silent, judgmental expression. And more often than not, Lance has felt the burn of it so profoundly that he’s immediately jerked his gaze away.

Shiro is pleasant at all times, and he seems determined to make sure that Keith eats, and sleeps, and takes proper breaks. He coddles Keith in a way that causes a quiet uproar among the rumor mill in the break rooms. They talk of favoritism often. They seem to think that Keith is getting special treatment, that he’s using Shiro to get ahead. Shiro, Lance thinks, must be their boss in some shape or form, in the same way that Coran is their boss, if everyone else’s habit of straightening up and seeming far more on task when either of them is around is any indication. Lance still isn’t entirely sure what they do around here, or what might happen if they were to get fired, but he makes a point of being friendly with both of them just in case.

He tries to mind his own business, but he can’t help but be nosy. Truth be told, he isn’t interested in any of the rumors surrounding Shiro—but more often than not, when people talk about him, they tend to bring up Keith.

It’s a guilty pleasure of his. It’s a bad habit that he’s barely trying to break.

But hearing about Keith is nice, even if it’s nasty. Even if the vast majority of it is too ridiculous to ever be true.

Today, however, is a busy day. Keith has already taken five trips beyond that closet and Lance is buried in so much paperwork that he can barely see Shiro over it when he shuffles through the door. He’s carrying his usual cardboard box filled with donuts. He shuts the door behind him with his foot against the wood. And he saunters over to the desk, sliding the donuts on it, offering Lance a smile that, while radiant, doesn’t manage to make him feel any better about the mountains of work that he’s currently drowning in.

Shiro leans across Keith’s desk, drawing so close to Keith’s face that Lance feels suddenly as though he’s some kind of voyeur, spying on a particularly intimate moment between the two of them.

Shiro, also, isn’t very good at being secretive. He seems to think that he whispers a lot quieter than he actually manages to drop his voice. It sounds like breathy talking. It’s still loud enough that Lance can hear every word clearly, but for Shiro’s sake, he pretends that he’s far too invested in his work to pay attention.

_ “Do you think he’s ready, Keith? You know, we’re running kind of thin on staff today. Ryan’s still ten cases behind, you’re barely keeping up. James has been chasing after that runaway since six this morning. They say that Coran is so backed up right now that he might not leave his office all night. I hate to say this, but… we could really use the extra help. It’s not going to get any easier for a long time.” _

Keith places the paper in his hands down harder on the desk than Lance thinks that he needs to. Shiro doesn’t jump like Lance does at the sound of it, but he does have the courtesy to send Lance an apologetic smile, while Keith pointedly does not.

“Does he look ready to you?”

Lance pretends to be scrutinizing the words on a random file when Shiro looks over at him. He doesn’t know if “being ready” is really a good thing or not, but he can’t help but feel as though he doesn’t want to disappoint Shiro. He definitely doesn’t want to seem totally inept in front of Keith—perhaps the only company that he might ever be forced to keep in this place for the rest of eternity.

“He doesn’t seem…  _ not _ ready. He always gets his work done on time. Plus, he’s nice. Empathetic. You could use someone who’s good with people on your team.”

Lance feels sorry for Shiro then, when he finds himself on the receiving end of perhaps the hottest glare that Lance has ever seen in his entire brief afterlife.

“He doesn’t even know where we are.” Lance shoots to attention when Keith’s eyes suddenly snap in his direction. His breath stalls in his lungs, his heart pattering desperately within the confines of his ribs. “Hey, intern, do you even know where we are? What we’re doing here?”

Lance doesn’t like the fact that Keith still has yet to call him by name, and he definitely doesn’t like the implication that he's gone through his entire life and death just to be nothing but a petty intern, but he still manages to choke on that indignation. He can’t think straight when Keith is focusing all of his attention on him. He snaps his head in Shiro’s direction in a feeble attempt to find some kind of comfort there. But Shiro just sends him that apologetic smile once again, hands raised in a small show of surrender as Keith continues staring him down.

It seems, right now, that Shiro has decided that this battle is perhaps one that’s better left unwon.

He isn’t brave or kind, a model or a movie star. He’s a coward and a betrayer. He’s a traitorous soldier who’s left Lance to suffer in the scorched Earth, at the mercy of the mouth of this terrifying dragon named Keith.

“We—We’re grim reapers, right? I—I mean… those clocks— _ tickers _ —they’re like… people’s lives, aren’t they? They represent lives, and… and when they stop, I guess… you go and get the souls or something?”

Keith rolls his eyes, breathing out sharply through his nose and turning a glare in Shiro’s direction. Shiro’s arms are still raised defensively, and he waves them about in a further display of surrender. Today, he’s wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt. Lance tries not to stare at the gold lining his arm for very long.

“Keith,” Shiro says suddenly, softly, as though he’s trying to coax a kicked dog out of a cage, “You can’t coddle him forever.”

Lance almost laughs, but thankfully, he’s able to stop it from coming out. He clears his throat loudly and awkwardly instead. He immediately shoves his nose back into his paperwork, wondering if Shiro’s definition of the word “coddle” has really become so warped after so many years spent dead that he truly believes that whatever the Hell kind of power play that Keith is working right now could ever be considered even remotely similar to protecting Lance from harm.

But Keith sighs, rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers. He buries his face in his hands again, groaning low and long, arching his shoulders and rolling them back, as though to work the tension from his muscles.

“It’s a natural disaster,” Keith says, “I’m not taking him out there during something like that. I can stay late and help the others get caught up, but I’m not taking him out there today. I’ll take him tomorrow. We don’t have as many scheduled for tomorrow.”

Shiro seems content enough with that response. He smiles gravely, patting the surface of the desk before shoving off of it. There’s something about his eyes then—something soft and sad, something mysteriously dark that Lance isn’t sure if he wants to understand. And when he looks to Lance again, he waves and tips his head to the side.

“Good luck, Lance.”

And he lets himself out into the hall, closing the door behind him.

Keith doesn’t look up from his paperwork for a very long time. They sit together in silence, with only the sound of their scratching pens filling the space between them.

And finally, after much time passes, Keith’s voice snaps him out of his thoughts, out of his contemplation of whether a death at 3 AM could be considered the morning or late night.

“You should have just pretended that you didn’t know anything.”

Lance allows that statement to hang there, afraid of what he might say in response.

Keith’s voice is sharp like the crack of a whip. It’s heavy with the weight of an emotion that Lance can’t identify.

It’s awkward for the rest of their shift. Keith doesn’t speak to him, and the silence between them feels palpable. He knows that Keith is upset about this. He just doesn’t understand why.

When he retires to bed for the evening, Keith stays behind.

He wonders what could be so terrible about passing through that closet.

He dreads that he’ll very soon find out.

 

* * *

 

Lance rises the next morning an hour early. There’s a digital clock that glows blue on the nightstand next to him, and he wonders if Hunk designed it. He wonders what might happen to the tickers that their God rejects—if maybe this poor clock is holding the soul of some sorry sucker who was never allowed to be born. If the grand clock overseeing the dining hall is actually some person who’s lived for an eternity.

He tries not to think about it.

But he wonders how he’ll feel today when he takes a life for the first time. He wonders who might have picked him up, too. Who might have led him to that train carriage moments after he’d stumbled away from his own death. And he wonders what dead people act like. If they even look like people, or if they’re nothing but glowing orbs of light.

He wonders if the person who they find today will drink from the empty teacup as well. If very soon, they’ll join him here, and if they’ll be a reaper like him or Keith. If they’ll make the tickers or man the cafe in the mess hall.

He isn’t sure how their roles in the afterlife are chosen. He doesn’t know which traits of his must have compelled Coran to bring him to Keith.

He rolls over, dragging his pillow out from under his head and smashing it over his face. He considers screaming into it, venting his frustrations here in his quiet bedroom instead of bringing them with him to work, but something stops him. He still isn’t sure how thick the walls are, but he doesn’t want to wake Hunk up when his job is surely more important. When it requires a lot more focus than just filling in random information on documents and handing them back over to Keith.

But he practices breathing in slowly through his mouth, holding it, then breathing out through his nose. He tries to count backward from one hundred in his head. He thinks about what sort of life he might have had before he died. He wonders if he had a family and friends—if they miss him now. If they have any idea where he is.

He wonders if he used to be religious, if he ever attended college, if he ever had a job. What he might have wanted to be when he got older. Which dreams he had that were inevitably cut short when he died.

And he wonders what sort of disaster he left in his wake. Who might have found his body, if he was ever found. He wonders what that white-hooded God might have thought of him when he reached forward to sip from that empty cup—if she’d seen potential in him. If she’d known that he would end up sitting in that seat at that exact moment all along.

And he wonders just what Hunk had wondered the day that they first met:

Why create people just to let them die so soon?

What was the purpose of giving him a life, a family, and hope, only to tear it away just when he was surely beginning to discover himself?

He reaches downward, tracing the circle of his belly that he can’t even remotely feel indented in his skin. But he knows from his time in the showers that there’s a large portion of it colored gold. It isn’t nearly as bright as Shiro’s—not as deep or detailed as the string of color around Hunk’s throat, or as numerous as the small holes dotted around Coran’s skin, but it stands out stark against his darker skin. It glitters when he catches sight of it in the locker room shower. Like golden bruises. As though he’d been barreled down with something large and heavy that had battered his entire torso and select portions of his legs.

He wonders where Keith’s mark is hiding. He wonders what might have killed him to bring him here.

It isn’t any use to worry about it, he thinks. There isn’t a good reason to agonize over whatever must have happened in the other world, especially considering that Keith himself probably doesn’t even remember it.

He rolls over again, burying his face into his pillow. He groans deeply, resigning himself to getting no more sleep before dragging himself up from the mattress. He collects his toiletries, supposing, at the very least, that he’ll be able to take a peaceful shower without being surrounded by a bunch of other bodies with their own mysterious death marks.

When he’s in the locker room, more often than not, his eyes can’t settle on a single spot. He’ll catch himself staring at a man with a long golden stripe down his back, but then he’ll catch sight of someone’s face splashed with gold. He’ll find marks that look like gunshot wounds. He’ll see stripes of gold on wrists. He’ll find himself so dizzied and overwhelmed by the rainbow of golden death that he can’t breathe, and he’ll stumble out into the hall—disoriented by it. Wondering why everyone else seems to be okay. Why he’s the only one who’s having a hard time getting used to this.

He slips out of his room, treading down the silent, dark halls towards the locker room. Under the door, he can see the slightest slivers of light. Around it, there’s steam billowing out into the hall. He resists the urge to turn on his heel and head back to his room. He reassures himself that someone getting up early to bathe definitely isn’t a sign that their white hooded God hates him and surely only selected his ticker in the first place because she wanted to watch him suffer.

Instead, he tucks his things under his arm, pushing open the door and stepping inside. There’s a shower running at the furthest corner of the room. It seems that there’s only one person in here right now, and he wonders how early they wake up every day just so they can avoid the crowds, or, if like himself, they just decided that the pursuit of sleep was useless tonight.

The locker room is a long, winding thing. There are showers in the front, a counter lined with sinks across from them. The mirrors hanging above are perpetually foggy. The white tile beneath his feet is slippery and moist at all times. There are a dozen shower stalls to his left, obscured by golden curtains. There are long benches where his coworkers set their things while they get ready. Around a corner, just beyond that occupied shower, there’s the opening to a room filled with lockers. He isn’t entirely sure what people keep in there, or why there always seem to be people socializing inside, but he’s avoided it previously.

He doesn’t feel the urge to explore just yet. His daily routine is confined to the mess hall, his dorm, this area of the locker room, and Keith’s office.

He lets out a tired sigh, choosing the shower stall at the exact opposite side of the room. He feels a little bit guilty for interrupting what might be a sacred time for this person, what might be something that they’ve worked hard to achieve in a building that Lance is starting to suspect that they can never really leave. Aside from the trips through the closet, Lance has never heard of anyone coming and going from this place as they please. And even during his days off, there are no doors leading out into a courtyard or a society aside from this.

Aside, of course, from a wide, double door through the grand hall that sits just beyond Coran’s office. Coran himself has told Lance never to venture too close to that place, that if he stepped through the doors, he wouldn’t be able to come back. It seems that this is the direction that the white hooded God comes and goes from—the fantastical life after death that he’d originally foregone in favor of spending his eternity here instead.

Coran seems to believe that everyone will end up there eventually, even though he’s been picking the tickers here for a good four hundred years now, and he doesn’t seem interested in retiring any time soon.

Lance shakes his head to clear his scattered thoughts, disrobing slowly after setting down his things. He collects them in a small pile on the bench across from the showers, peeking around the stalls to make sure that the inhabitant of the other stall isn’t going to finish bathing soon enough to see him nude.

No one else seems to mind it, seems to even bat an eye at the sight of male nudity, but he’s already grown accustomed to taking his towel with him into the stall. He knows that after death, there’s really no need for modesty, but he finds that he isn’t exactly comfortable with the way that the workers around him compare their death marks like badges of honor, spinning outlandish yarns to explain away how they might have earned them.

Hunk had told him casually that he believes that he was decapitated while working on some sort of dangerous machinery. He claims that one's death directly impacts the job that they’ll be tasked with in the afterlife, and he feels especially connected to the cogs and cords that come along with the clocks. His partner, he says, a young girl not much older than fifteen, has spidery veins of gold spun from between her fingers all the way up her arm. The two of them had decided that she must have been electrocuted. They’d talked about it indifferently as though it was nothing more than a subtle change in the weather. Devoid of the passion that they might have embodied had the conversation been more focused on clocks.

The conversation itself had made Lance feel nothing but disgust. But anxiety and discomfort, and maybe just a little bit sick to his stomach.

He turns on the shower, hanging his towel on a hook just outside of the water’s reach before stepping under the spray of it. He runs his fingers through his hair, wetting it down. He lets out a soft groan as the hot water works the strain from his muscles, the stress that seems to be bunched just between his shoulder blades.

And he listens to the sound of the water hitting the tile, the echo of the spray booming in his ears. He finds himself zoning out, lapsing between this reality and his few memories—the imaginings of a distant past life and a family who he might never recognize ever again. The beautiful but prickly Keith, hunched over his desk. The charming and handsome Shiro. The friendly, welcoming Hunk.

He imagines that maybe this isn’t anywhere near as nice as heaven, but it isn’t too shabby compared to whatever he might have once thought existed beyond death either. And he knows that today might be difficult for him, but he’ll get used to it in time. Maybe someday he’ll be just as talented as Keith, renowned enough that he’s allowed an office by himself, that he’s given interns to help with paperwork, that bosses speak to him as though he’s somehow in charge.

And maybe someday the gold embedded in his skin won’t bother him quite as much anymore. Maybe he’ll stop wondering why Keith’s facial scar isn’t golden when Shiro’s is. Maybe all of the things that don’t make sense in this life will suddenly stop feeling so terribly important, and he’ll settle into a new normal that feels just as much like home as the endless void of memories that he can feel like words on the tip of his tongue.

And suddenly, he realizes that he’s hearing music. He realizes that someone is singing softly, just a little shaky and out of tune. But the sound of it is lilting, somehow flawed and beautiful all at once. Lance hasn’t heard music since he got here, and while he knows in theory what music is, he can’t recall a single song.

_ “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.” _

Their voice rattles with an unpracticed vibrato. They seem to think that they’re still alone. They’re singing as though truly, no one is listening, as though in this peaceful, short lapse of time, they’ve been given this echoed stage to ring out this song that Lance feels as though he’s somehow heard before.

_ “That this heart of mine embraces—all day and through—” _

Lance allows himself to fall back against the shower wall. His back meets the cold tile, but he barely feels it at all. He’s smiling now, barely realizing as he does it. A hand slides over his belly, resting just over the golden splotch of bruises painted there. The fingers of the other hand slide against the tiles, as his head falls back against the wall. As he closes his eyes and listens to the ups and downs of this person’s voice.

_ “In that small cafe, the park across the way. The children’s carousel, the chestnut trees. The wishing well—” _

He’s drawing in deep breaths now, his chest expanding out wide, pushing in with deep exhales. He’s filled with an emotion that he doesn’t fully comprehend. Unbridled, trembling. He feels tears rise to his eyes.

Music is beautiful. This man’s voice is beautiful.

Lance hasn’t experienced beauty since he died. Since he witnessed the astounding, earth-quaking glory of the white hooded God, since he breathed in Keith’s sour scowl that very first day.

He’s caught glimpses of pretty things, of remarkable things. He’s born witness to people and places so whimsical that he feels as though they can’t possibly be real.

But those words, the song, that voice, they nearly bring him to his knees. And he doesn’t understand it one bit. The old him—the living him, the young him taken from the world so soon—he must have loved music. He can feel every stripe of gold lit up on his body, as though vibrating with the pulse of a heartbeat of its own.

_ “I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day. In everything that’s light and gay, I’ll always think of you that way—” _

Lance wonders if Keith has ever heard music. He wonders if his mother used to sing. He thinks about lullabies, about concerts, and children’s plays. He imagines himself as a living, breathing person—happy and laughing, surrounded by friends. He imagines a world where he’s existing, growing. Where he’s been allowed to pursue anything. To get married. To have children. To watch his parents grow old, to raise his grandchildren, to die peaceful and contented, without these questions about his old life sticking to him like a second skin, no matter where he goes.

He feels these emotions getting caught up in his throat. He feels tethered to this moment, tied here as he’s never been bound to anything else before. He feels silly, childish, nearly brought to tears by another person’s warbling voice.

But the words cut off abruptly, and the shower in the stall across the room shuts off. Lance jerks to attention almost immediately, sliding on the wet tile as he fumbles over to turn off the stream. He doesn’t know why he feels so compelled to meet this singer when they seemed so determined to find privacy to sing their song. He knows that they might have discovered that they weren’t totally alone by now, and surely they’re scrambling to get dressed and leave as soon as possible, before they’re spotted but their unwitting audience. He knows that’s what he’d do. He knows that he’d be so embarrassed that he’d probably never sing again.

But he needs to tell them that it’s okay. He needs to beg them to teach him that song. He just needs to see them, to talk to them, to somehow express to them how much their singing affected him, how much the comfort of it helped him when he’s still so scared and confused and clumsy in this afterlife that makes so much less sense than he feels like it should by now.

So he neglects to grab his towel in his haste. He nearly tumbles out of the shower in his hurry to catch them before they’re gone.

And when he pulls back the curtain, when he slides out into the locker room on slick tile and clumsy feet, he’s greeted with the shocked, red-blotched expression of the last person who he would have expected to be connected to that wonderful voice.

Keith, standing with a towel around his waist. Keith, with the long, splintered lines of gold fanning out from beneath his towel all the way to his shoulders.

Keith, so surprised now that his mouth is slack and agape, his cheeks are so pink that his entire head seems to be dyed red. His hands are clutching so tightly to the towel around him that his knuckles are shaking white.

Lance stops. He chokes on the saliva and the words and the breath rising in his throat. He’s spread here, bared and on display. His brain takes a few seconds too long to realize exactly what sort of position he’s put himself in, right in front of his new singing idol and his prickly, no-nonsense boss.

“I—I—”

“Put some clothes on.”

And then, abruptly, Keith snaps his head away, padding off into the deeper end of the locker room—presumably, Lance thinks, to get dressed and ready for the day.

It makes sense if he can manage to consider it thought his mortification, that Keith would have heard music. During his business trips through the closet, along the way of collecting souls, surely someone must have been listening to the radio. Surely, something must have been playing on TV.

Lance straightens himself up, rattling out a breath before cursing himself softly and stepping back into the shower. The warm water doesn’t feel quite as soothing against his heated skin when he turns the knob again, and instead, he switches it to cold. He practices his breathing once again, giving himself about a hundred pep talks to will himself out of the shower once he takes his sweet time washing his hair and his body.

Keith probably won’t bring it up. Keith barely talks to him as it is. Keith surely didn’t look at him long enough to get an eyeful—and really, what does he have to be embarrassed about anyway? It’s not like he doesn’t have a lot going on down there. It’s not like Keith could possibly dislike what he saw, if he really took the time to study Lance.

Surely, it’s not nearly as big of a deal as Lance feels like it is right now. This is a public locker room, for God’s sake! There are dozens of naked guys in here every single day! Keith doesn’t own it. He doesn’t hold the rights to the room just because he apparently makes a point of coming in here obscenely early in the morning just so he can sing a little while he’s alone.

And, if anything, making a special trip to the locker room just to jam out should be far more humiliating than just… being naked in the shower! That’s what’s _ supposed _ to happen in the shower, he’s not weird for being naked here!

Lance convinces himself that Keith is far more humiliated than he is. He tells himself that maybe Keith won’t be able to look him in the eye either.

But he can’t help but wonder what in the world was going on with that mark. He can’t help but contemplate the various hypothetical war stories that many people in the locker room have used to explain their own marks over the weeks that he’s frequented this place.

His own gold is surely a bruise. It’s surely the aftermath of being hit by something very hard. And Coran must have been shot by something that shattered—like shotgun shrapnel, like an old-timey powder gun that blew up in his face. Hunk, true to his theories, was surely decapitated, and the girl who works with him seems to have been electrocuted, just as she’s claimed.

Shiro is trickier, but Lance imagines that losing an arm could possibly result in enough lost blood to bleed to death if left untreated. He imagines that a car accident probably could have done it, and it might explain the scar on his face as well.

But Keith… Keith’s marks were both deep and various. They were dragged up his body as though he’d been torn completely apart.

Lance feels a shiver work up his spine. He decides, in a moment of self-preservation, not to think about it anymore.

And he’s running a little low on time, anyway. He realizes that he only has fifteen minutes before he needs to clock in for work. Throughout the room, more employees start to file in. Lance brushes his hair, his teeth. He wipes away the fog on the mirror and checks his appearance before he changes back into the pajamas that he came in.

A passing thought plagues him just as he steps into the hall.

He wonders, guiltily, if Keith used to sing in his office, too, when he was alone.

He wonders just how many things he’s ruined for Keith, just by taking up residence in his previously peaceful and solitary life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song used in this chapter is [‘I’ll Be Seeing You’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDlKb2cBAqU), originally written by [Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ll_Be_Seeing_You_\(song\)).


	3. Dead Beat

By the time that Lance makes it to the office for his shift, a mug of steaming coffee is already waiting on his desk. Keith is gradually working his way through a small pile of paperwork, and Lance doesn’t miss the way that his brows lower, that his jaw seems to tighten when Lance closes the door softly behind him.

The apples of Keith’s cheeks darken, swatched with a comely shade of pink that catches Lance’s attention for just a little bit too long. The image of those golden scars webbing out over the chiseled muscles of Keith’s abdomen is still branded in the back of his thoughts, but Lance can’t deny that Keith is still attractive. The gold of it complemented the peachy shade of Keith’s skin. It looked like sparkling paint over marble, like some kind of art exhibit that Lance can almost remember, like a masterpiece crafted from stone.

And Keith saw him naked, he can’t allow himself to forget. Keith, at least, had the decency to cover up. Keith, to his credit, surely wasn’t nearly as impressed by what he saw as Lance was.

He resists the urge to apologize, biting hard down on his tongue just to stop the words before they threaten to bubble up and tumble out of his mouth. He knows that nothing that he could say now would make anything better. He knows that his penchant for shuffling whatever nice sentiment or relevant thought that his mind conjures up somewhere along the way to his mouth would only embarrass the two of them further.

He knows that Keith isn’t much of a talker. If their time spent together has taught him anything, it’s that Keith finds more comfort in a shared silence than he could ever find in spoken word. Lance allows him this because he can’t stop thinking about the music.

And he hopes desperately, privately, pitifully, that this small misstep on his part won’t cause Keith to never sing again.

Instead of fumbling with an explanation or an apology, he simply nods, breathes hard, and makes a quick beeline to his desk. He pulls out his chair and takes a seat before rolling the wheels closer to the edge. There are only three papers on his desk today, and they look different than the ones that he’s been filling out for the last three weeks. They’re disclaimers, he realizes, but the terms that he’s being asked to sign off on are far more bizarre than anything that his technical knowledge of disclaimers tells him is actually normal.

_ “Employee M-170299, Lance [redacted]” _

This first part is scrawled in a neat hand. The letters are straight and narrow, professional and unimaginative. He knows from some vague sense of a memory that some people have interesting handwriting. Some people dot their I’s with little hearts or curl the tails of their J’s. Some people draw bubbly or loopy letters, and they express themselves through the personality of their script. This writing gives nothing away. Just clean, black letters in dark ink on white page. It isn’t Keith’s jagged, hurried penmanship. He wonders who filled this out before him.

_ “Employee M-170299 is hereby assigned under the supervision of Employee E-010894, Keith [redacted], on a probationary basis. M-170299 is required to shadow E-010894 for the duration of no less than 160 work hours, until the end of the training period. Failure to comply with the agreed upon stipulations of this contract may result in penalties as severe as discharge. All discrepancies with this contract should be reported by M-170299 to E-010894 before the completion of this form. E-010894 is required by company policy to report any issues with M-170299’s performance to a higher ranking employee immediately. Failure to comply with these rules may result in termination for one or both employees involved.” _

It goes on a laundry list of legal jargon, all written in the same stuffy way that makes Lance’s head spin. He has a lot of trouble focusing on any of it, so he skips ahead. He has a feeling that a straight-shooter like Keith will remind him if he’s toeing forbidden territory anyway. And Keith definitely isn’t in the mood today to let any mistakes on his part simply pass without making a note of them.

Part of him wonders if he’d be better off with a lazier mentor. He wonders if he’d have more fun with one of the reapers who he sometimes talks to in the breakroom. But he knows that those guys are often swamped with a backlog of unresolved cases. He knows that Keith, mysteriously, is one of the only reapers who seems to be capable of keeping up with the demanding fast pace of this job.

Their coworkers have a lot of theories about this, but none of them ever seem to trace back to the idea that maybe he really is just that talented.

Lance doesn’t know enough about the situation to comment on it. But a few of the guys had warned him, when he’d told them in passing that he’d be training starting today, to be careful. To be realistic. To understand that things would only get harder for him once he was free to fly from the nest, and Shiro’s “preferential treatment of Keith” no longer benefited him.

He doesn’t like considering that this might be the case. Despite how many people seem to believe it, he still wants more than anything to believe that it’s not true.

He rubs his eyes, forcing himself to skim through more of the document, jotting down his initials next to the appropriate spaces.

_ Employee agrees not to interfere with the deaths of living beings.  _ **_L_ **

_ Employee agrees to return the souls of deceased beings to the afterlife by any means necessary.  _ **_L_ **

_ Employee agrees not to spend more than 10 consecutive hours in the living world.  _ **_L_ **

_ Employee agrees not to interact with living humans unless absolutely necessary. In the event that a living human is alerted of the employee’s existence, the employee agrees to report the incident to their immediate supervisor in no more than 72 business hours.  _ **_L_ ** _ ” _

He feels dazed, disoriented. His head pulses with the beginning twinges of a stress headache just between his eyebrows. He sneaks a look in Keith’s direction, but Keith is making a point of focusing somehow even harder on the documents on his desk than he normally does. Lance shakes his head, scrubbing a hand over his face before agonizing over the remaining few paragraphs on the page.

Only then, out of the corner of his eye, does he catch a hint of Keith’s dark mop of hair moving to peek in his direction. It’s subtle, barely a full tilt of his head, but Lance catches Keith sneaking small glances in his direction. He feels his cheeks warm at the mere thought of it. He wonders, for a split second, what Keith thinks when he looks at him.

If he’s worried about him—if he worries about him when they’re not at work. If he thinks about him at all once their shift ends, Lance returns to his room, and Keith does whatever it is that he does when he isn’t out socializing or exercising in this building’s gym. When he isn’t in the library, or the movie theater, when he makes himself so scarce around the public recreational areas of this compound that people here often whisper that he might not even exist when he isn’t working.

He clears his throat, willing himself to stay on task and just ignore Keith for the time being. It’s not an easy request to make of himself, he knows that, but he also knows that stalling isn’t going to do either of them any favors. And Keith, he knows, can be impatient. He can already imagine how frustrated he’ll be in a few moments if Lance is still fumbling his way through this sheet. How he’ll ask with barely concealed indignation and obvious disappointment, _ “How long is it going to take for you to read that?” _

He almost laughs at the thought of it, and he isn’t sure why any of this seems so charming to him. But somehow, over time, Keith’s prickliness has only become yet another aspect of his presence that Lance has come to find so terribly, overwhelmingly difficult not to fall deeply in love with.

He’s got it bad, he knows that for a fact. But right now, he really needs to pay attention to this document.

It seems to be asking many of the same questions. Don’t stay out for too long, don’t save anyone. Don’t interact with anyone in the living world. Don’t make an attempt to reconnect with living beings who aren’t on your assigned list. Don’t harvest the souls of anyone who isn’t listed for that day.

It’s strangely bureaucratic for being so unnervingly supernatural. It’s weirdly professional for looking like something that’s jumped straight out of a kind of whimsical children’s novel.

Despite his foreboding feelings about the whole thing, he continues to initial the blank spaces next to each line. At the very end of the first document, he signs his name—looping the L into the A, both bumps of the cursive N, curling the end of his c into the edge of the E, and holding the paper just a little bit further away from his face to admire it. He can’t remember if his signature looked like this when he was alive. He wonders if penmanship is part of the muscle memory and technical knowledge that he carried with him even after his memories were erased.

But it looks like a nice signature anyway. He feels like it’s fairly representative of himself as an employee and a person. Playful, in a way, but professional all the same. He feels a surge of pride fanning out warm in his chest. He can’t help but smile at it. He can’t help but feel like this is just the beginning of himself, the renowned reaper, Lance Whatever. The best employee that the afterlife has ever seen since Keith.

The next document seems to be pretty much all of the same terms as the first one, just rephrased. He wonders why they’ve decided to be so careful. He wonders what might happen if he were to break any of these rules. “Discharge” and “termination” seem especially heavy, especially ominous when he suspects that the greatest penalty in this world could potentially be moving on to the other side.

And he knows that it shouldn’t, but the unknown of that scares him. He stays up late at night sometimes, restlessly shifting around, smashing his pillow over his face, thinking about what sort of world might lie on the other side of that gigantic door in the grand hall. Considering how much better or worse the great beyond might be than where he is now.

It’s a terrifying thought, not knowing where he’ll go after his second death. And he wonders, miserably, if he was ever afraid of dying when he was alive.

He finishes filling out the documents if only to distract himself, pushing up from his desk chair and collecting the papers in his hands. He pats the bottom of the pile against the surface of the desk, organizing them in a neat stack before shuffling around to where Keith sits, still pretending that he isn’t paying him any mind.

Lance prods the papers out, practically shoving them into Keith’s face. And Keith looks up, only then, with the same flat, unfriendly frown that Lance has grown so accustomed to over the weeks. There’s an energy popping in the air between them now, however, and Lance wants nothing more than for both of them to pretend that it’s not there. He knows that seeing Keith’s death mark must have been something of more of a sensitive nature. He understands that Keith wouldn’t only sneak away so early in the morning to sing alone. That if he really has made the continued effort to be discreet, maybe he didn’t want anyone to see what Lance saw. Maybe, all this time, he’s been so secretive and so reclusive because he’s afraid to let anyone else that close.

He thinks that he can definitely empathize, to a degree, when he considers the violent ends that must have led to Keith being mended back together in such a way. The thick lines of gold in his white skin were telling of a past that must not have been easy. The dark scar against Keith’s cheek has always made Lance wonder who would be cruel enough to damage such a pretty face.

Keith is gorgeous and he’s hard to get close to. And he seems to have a “soft spot” for Lance if everyone’s jokes about the two of them around the office are any indication.

It’s no mystery why Lance has found himself so enamored with Keith, but when Keith reaches forward, plucking the papers from Lance’s hand—combing through them carefully, as though he’s in desperate search of any mistakes that might allow him to deny Lance his first trip through the closet for at least another day—Lance wonders why Keith cares so much. He wonders what someone like Keith could possibly see in someone as scared, and confused, and pathetic as himself.

He’s nothing more than an empty husk where memories should be. He’s the ghost of a personality that he must have once had in the past, with no substance blossoming within him over the meager month that he’s been here, in place of the centuries that other reapers have had to develop themselves from the ground up.

Shiro is kind and sometimes he tries to be funny. He isn’t usually very funny, but he _ thinks  _ that he is, and Lance imagines that this is a personality trait that sets him apart from other people. Hunk is fidgety and sometimes kind of pushy. He can be nosy and accidentally mean, but he’s affectionate and comforting. Coran is boisterous and animated. He never seems to be tired. He speaks in purple prose. He mothers everyone who he meets.

Keith is prickly. He can be rude and impatient and distant. He’s private and he’s quiet. He does little things to show that he cares.

And Lance is a blank slate. He experiences things. He sleeps and he works and he eats his meals in the mess hall every morning and evening, and sometimes during lunch on particularly slow days. He feels like a sheet of glass. He feels transparent. He doesn’t know what Keith could see in him, why he doesn’t just look right through him.

He feels as though he should have gotten the hang of this weeks ago, as though he’s forever going to trail far behind everyone else.

He doesn’t hate this world or this job or this life. He just wishes, helplessly, that he could finally start to fit in here.

Keith draws in a deep breath. He sets the papers on the desk and pulls his pen from the little jar of ink where it rests. Keith carries the juxtaposition of their supernatural line of work and the retro art deco of this universe very beautifully. He looks just as at home here in a desk in a brightly-lit office as he might look standing in Coran’s ticker room. He’s pretty here, in a plain suit in a bland office, as he might look pretty standing on a crowded sidewalk, as he might be tucked away on a couch in a vast library. As he might seem in any place that Lance can conjure up in his thoughts. And Lance can’t imagine a single place where Keith won’t shine like the morning sun, where he won’t be the sole pinpoint of the universe that everything else revolves around.

Lance wonders if he had to die in order to meet the love of his life. He wonders if his destiny was here all along and if perhaps the white hooded figure knew that.

He wonders if he’d ever felt this alive in life, or if maybe, he needed to meet his untimely end in order to find something that truly made existence feel worth it.

It’s startlingly romantic. He shakes his head. Keith raises an eyebrow, but he doesn’t take his eyes off of the papers that he’s signing off on.

“So?”

Lance’s words hang in the air.

And suddenly, the door behind him pushes open.

When he turns, it’s Shiro’s smiling face that greets him from the threshold. In each hand, there’s a coffee, and Lance swallows the urge to tell him that Keith already placed one on his desk this morning. It’s surely cold by now, and no matter how much he hates the taste, he still can’t help but appreciate what a considerate gesture it is. He wonders if one of his burgeoning personality traits is accepting a favor even if it inconveniences him. He wonders if Keith and Shiro understand perfectly well that he doesn’t like coffee, but they’re just testing him by continuously offering it to him.

And he wonders if Shiro is here today for business or just a friendly visit. Shiro must remember that this is his first day of training and like any good boss should, maybe he’s just here to make sure that everything is in order before they begin.

The golden mark striped across Shiro’s nose sparkles in the fluorescent lights. He’s beaming a grin so wide and welcoming that Lance feels as though he’s been wrapped in a warm blanket. Momentarily, his nervousness ebbs away. He tries to tell himself that Shiro wouldn’t be so chipper if they were sending him off to face his proverbial second death. He considers that it must not be that big of a deal anyway since Keith does this sort of thing all the time.

As he’s contemplating this, as Keith continues shuffling through his paperwork, Shiro nudges the door closed behind him with his foot. His shoes have been polished perfectly, sparkling, almost reflective. Lance wonders if maybe he could see his face in them. Shiro always takes good care of himself. He never looks tired, never telling of the stress of the job that Lance knows must exist there. And he’s always smiling, unlike Keith. He seems to carry the belief with him everywhere that what they’re doing is lucrative. It’s worth it. It’s for the greater good.

Lance, in a profound moment of pessimism, wonders if Shiro ever gets sad. He wonders if, at times, Keith is the one to mend the two of them together, in place of this recurring, familiar scene of Shiro coming to offer comfort, for soft conversation, and Keith tentatively letting him in.

Lance wouldn’t say that he’s jealous of Shiro, not really. He has a sense that their relationship is completely platonic, that Shiro sees Keith as more of a lost puppy than the handsome, awe-inspiring angel that he truly is. That Keith sees Shiro as more of a mentor than the Adonis that he was so obviously crafted by the white hooded figure to be.

But he wonders how Shiro managed to get so close to Keith. In this world, this confusing, bewildering afterlife that presents an endless Rolodex of questions in place of any answers that fellow reapers might have. And how Keith learned to be so closed-off. How the two of them grew together, apart from everyone else. And how no one else seems to know the answers to those questions either, despite the fact that some of them, surely, have been here longer than both Keith and Shiro combined.

“Everything in order?” Shiro asks the room, seeming to be smiling at everyone, as though he truly doesn’t realize that he’s the boss here and he can tell them if they’re ready instead of asking for their affirmation. “Do you think he’s good to shadow you for today?”

Keith, when Lance turns back to him, bites the inside of his cheek. He holds the papers out over the surface of his desk, not making a move to rise from his seat.

Shiro’s smile purses, but he doesn’t seem even remotely annoyed. He pauses on his journey to grab the files, handing Lance one of the coffees in a cardboard to-go cup, covered by a white, plastic lid with a little tab covering the mouth hole.

Lance wonders if anyone could manage to care so little about any of this that they’d be able to drink while working and without throwing it back up. He hadn’t had time this morning to stop in the cafeteria for breakfast, and despite his absence of hunger or thirst or any of the very human urges that he feels as though people might have in the living world, he feels his stomach churn at the mere thought of consuming anything.

But he takes the mug and thanks Shiro meekly. He takes a sip of it just to be polite, popping the tab over the mouth hole and pressing the lid to his lips. He forces a smile, thankful that Shiro thought to add sugar and cream for him, but still wholly incapable of seeing any of the apparent merits in this sort of drink. It tastes too bitter. It’s too hot. The dressings are deceptive, masking the nasty smell, but when it rolls down his throat, Lance has to practice a massive amount of self-control not to gag on it.

He just hates coffee, plain and simple. And Keith is watching him now, still with flat lips, still with low eyebrows and unreadable eyes—but there an inkling of something in him that Lance reads immediately as amusement at his expense. He resists the urge to stick his tongue out at him.

Shiro places the other mug down on Keith’s desk. He takes the papers from Keith’s hands and thumbs through them.

“Everything is filled out correctly?”

Keith nods.

And, with less attention to detail than Lance thinks is necessary for their particular line of work, Shiro accepts Keith’s word at face value.

Easily, Lance could imagine that their roles are switched. Keith is the boss, calling the shots, and Shiro is the helpless employee, chasing his whims.

“Well then, I guess I can give you this.” Shiro turns again, back to Lance, and procures something small and shiny from his pocket. It’s fastened to a long, golden chain. It’s clicking quietly as Shiro presses it towards Lance in his open palm.

It’s an ornate, golden pocket watch. Lance almost groans at how overdone this whole clock theme is by now.

But he takes it anyway, tests the weight of it in his hands. He studies the filigree carved, smooth and deep and elaborate, into the sparkling surface of it. He notes the two buttons at the top and bottom of it, the small pegs indented with curly calligraphic letters. One “S” and one “G”. It’s peculiar, but he can’t say that he’s particularly surprised. If this were a month ago, and perhaps the very first strange thing that he’d encountered here, yeah, sure, he might have been a little bit thrown off. But he likes to imagine that he’s more seasoned by now. He’s familiar with everything that this bizarre world has to throw at him, or, at the very least, he isn’t surprised when some new weird thing presents itself.

“This is your ticker,” Shiro tells him, “Refurbished, so to speak. It will allow you to pass through our universe into the human world, and those buttons there—”

He motions at the top button, then reaches around to signify the other.

“The top one will give you a physical form. So humans will be able to see you. You’ll be able to interact with anything on Earth. Until you enable it, you won’t be seen by any living being, but you also won’t be able to move things to climb into cars, talk to any people who might be able to help you on your journey, or… anything that might assist you. The bottom button will make you invisible to humans again, of course.  It’s suggested that you don’t stay in physical form for more than thirty minutes, but only because it’s known to cause some pretty extreme vertigo. It’s not easy being tethered to a human body after leaving one. And you never know who might see you. They probably won’t think much of it, and they might not even remember seeing you, but…”

“But you’ll remember them,” Keith says flatly, head rested over his laced fingers, elbows propped up on the surface of his desk, “I know you have this  _ thing _ right now where you think that having the answers is going to make you happy, but it’s not. And if you make a point of talking to some human and they recognize you, not only are you breaching your contract, but you’re going to regret it.”

Shiro breathes a laugh. He tells Keith softly, humorously, not to be so serious.

“You’ll enjoy this in time,” Shiro tells Lance then, clapping a hand on his shoulder, “The first day is hard. It might feel like you’ll never get used to it, but eventually, you will. And eventually, it starts to feel more rewarding.”

Keith snorts. Shiro makes a point of ignoring him.

But Lance nods, anxiety fluttering in his chest. Shiro makes him want to be a good person, a deft worker. He wants nothing more right now than to do exactly what Shiro asks of him—and to prove Keith wrong, too. To show him that he can do this job without allowing his personal goals and biases to get in the way. He can be a good reaper, and maybe the best reaper! Maybe an employee even more talented than Keith.

Shiro reaches out a hand, and Lance fumbles with his coffee and pocket watch before he manages to squeeze both of them together. He takes Shiro’s hand, shaking it loosely three times, and Shiro’s smile softens. His eyes are low and hooded. His brows knit close together.

“You’ll do great, I can feel it. Good luck, Lance.”

And with that, with a short nod at Keith and a quick, lax wave, he takes his leave.

After the resounding click of the door behind him, Keith and Lance are alone in the thick silence. Keith is still sitting quietly in his desk. Lance is still holding the cardboard mug of coffee together with the watch in his hand.

The watch clicks softly. Lance feels something strange, warm, spreading out in his chest. He feels as though he’s been granted another piece of himself that must have been missing before—his soul, he thinks. This silly little ticker. Shiro alluded to the fact that this tiny thing must have at one time been a part of him. It must have been the very ticker that housed his past, and his future, and inevitably heaved its last breath before dying in Coran’s stuffy little dark office.

Repurposed, as he, too, has been repurposed. He sets his coffee down on Keith’s desk, holding the clock closer to his face. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Keith pull back his sleeve, checking the golden watch clasped around his wrist.

“We’re going to be late,” he says, “We need to get going.”

He pushes himself back in his chair, pressing his palms to the top of his desk and shoving himself up. He grabs the coffee that Shiro left him and takes a big, long gulp, practically slamming it back down before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It’s the first and only tell of his own nervousness, and Lance allows him this moment of weakness, his eyes trailing away from Keith and settling instead on the closet door.

It’s hard to see Keith so jittery now, when he’s been relying on him to be a rock, of sorts, all these weeks. To be the one stable, reliable thing that Lance himself can hold onto.

Not that… he’s really planning on  _ touching _ Keith, or holding him close, or having any physical contact with him at all. And it’s not like he’s ever actually imagined getting close enough to Keith to wrap his arms around him, or run his fingers through that soft hair, over that pretty, smooth skin, to understand how warm his lips must be, or to gaze closer into those deep, dark eyes, but—

He’s suddenly alight with heat. He’s suddenly so frazzled that he barely comprehends Keith grabbing him by the sleeve and dragging him closer to the door.

“Keep your wits about you, intern,” Keith says, low and slow and even, “Pay attention, or you might miss something important.”

And, with that, he pulls open the door to an empty closet. It’s barely big enough to fit the two of them inside without either of them touching, and Lance is dreadfully aware of all of the places that their arms brush, that Keith’s hair tickles the side of his face as he fiddles with his wristwatch. Lance is painfully conscious of the warmth of Keith’s skin radiating so close by and of how nice he smells despite the fact that surely they both used the same soap and shampoo to clean themselves in the locker room this morning. How much prettier he is up close. How the pout of his lips is hard to draw his gaze away from. How the top button of his dress shirt has come undone, revealing a small sliver of smooth, milky skin.

Suddenly, light surrounds them. Suddenly, Lance can hear the chattering of voices, the roars of motors, the horns and cawing birds and tittering music just beyond the other side of the door.

When Keith pushes it open, it’s brighter and busier than the bland dimness of his office. There are people passing by on a long, wide sidewalk, cars slowly creeping in traffic up a bustling street. The sun above is shining and bright and warm, just like he almost remembers. There are sights and sounds and smells that his brain feels as though it’s seen many times before this.

Lance has a feeling that he’s finally returning home.

But this place, these people, these smells and sights and sounds—

He doesn’t know if he’d ever even seen them in life.

It’s almost right, almost familiar. But memories still feel like words trapped just on the tip of his tongue. He couldn’t recall any of this, even if he tried.


	4. Grande Sonnerie

Lance isn’t proud of the fact that Keith practically has to peel him out of the closet and drag him into the street. He’s holding his pocket watch in a death grip against his chest, trembling in a way that feels subtle, at first, until Keith’s hands are there steadying him, and he realizes that he’s shaking hard enough that he almost seems to be vibrating.

For a moment, he tries to console himself, for the mere sake of appearing more natural and normal among the countless people surrounding them. He takes a few dozen shallow breaths, thrown off by his own looming sense of vertigo in a situation that, until now, he’d thought that he’d wanted more than anything in the universe to come true.

He’s spent so many days now fantasizing about what he might do if he were allowed to come home. Where he’d visit, who he’d talk to, as though he has any way of even remembering the people who must have mattered to him when he was alive. But he’d told himself back then that he would play it by ear. He’d figure things out in the moment. Surely, he’d told himself, just being back on Earth would be a relief. And perhaps the memories would flood back to him the moment that he found himself among the living people.

When now, faced with this recurring dream as a very real reality, he just feels as though he might throw up.

Before he can actually decide if he’s going to be sick or not, Keith is hauling him forward, hand tight around his wrist. They’re passing through the crowds seamlessly and wandering out into the street to wind through the stalling cars, backed up in a mid-afternoon traffic that Lance suddenly remembers is very normal for a city this size.

And Lance is reminded, only when his hip should graze the front bumper of a taxi and passes straight through it instead, that they’re nothing but ghosts out here. No one can see them or touch them. It doesn’t matter how weird he might be acting right now, because only Keith—who already thinks that he’s a weird, useless idiot anyway—is here to bear witness to it. He swallows thickly, clasping his sweaty hand ever-tighter around his pocket watch. He allows himself to be guided by Keith, convinces himself that he isn’t in dreamland now, imagining that perhaps this is the closest to holding hands with another person that he ever has been and might ever be.

Because the dating pool back in the afterlife isn’t exactly the brightest and most plentiful that Lance could have possibly hoped for. Beyond Keith, so standoffish and distant and far too good for anyone, and Shiro—who Lance can’t stay in a room with for longer than five minutes without feeling as though he might shrink down to a single speck of dust and float away—well, there isn’t really anyone else who Lance could imagine himself being interested in.

And sure, with Shiro, he finds himself drawn to the guy in the same way that his attention suddenly catches sight of the perfect, airbrushed abdomens of models plastered all over the vast windows of a clothing shop. His eyes dance across their sculpted abs, their coy little grins. In monochrome, they remind him a whole lot of the dreary sunlessness of Keith’s office, where regularly, he’d find Shiro chatting to Keith as well. He takes in the bold letters plastered across the bottom of the posters. Abercombie, he remembers that brand. It sits in the back of his thoughts, nagging at him. He wonders if he ever shopped there when he was alive.

But the fact still stands that Shiro still feels like more of a thing to be admired from afar than a person who he’d ever think of being interested in. Shiro is like the sole sun of their galaxy back in the afterlife—beautiful and warm, but too hot to touch.

And Lance knows, deep down, that he only has eyes for one person around the office anyway. No matter how nice or charming or attractive a guy like Shiro might be.

Of course, the person who Lance himself finds more attractive than Shiro just happens to be even more untouchable than Shiro is, but he likes to remind himself that many people have told him that Keith “has a soft spot for him” or “coddles him”. And that can’t be anything but a good sign.

He isn’t sure why he’s suddenly thinking about any of this. He doesn’t know why Keith touching him in the most unromantic manner possible already has the sound of wedding bells chiming, loud and overbearing, in his thoughts. Or why he’s imagining that maybe Keith might have been well suited for modeling in life, if he’s so pretty now, in death. He wouldn’t mind seeing what Keith would look like on one of those black and white posters instead of the beefcakes who are spread out there instead. That thought nags at him too, and it sticks to him no matter how desperately he tries to save the fantasy of it for later on. Preferably, when he’s alone.

Lance is so immersed in his thoughts that he doesn’t even notice when Keith stops walking. He doesn’t sense Keith’s eyes following the trail of his gaze either, or the flush that stains his cheeks when he catches Lance admiring the scantily-clad men plastered over those tall windows.

He pulls his hand away from Lance’s wrist, checking his watch once more after pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Look,” he says, clipped, brief, frustrated, “We don’t have a lot of time, so listen closely. Are you listening to me? _ Lance _ ?”

Lance’s attention is abruptly torn away from the perfectly round and perky nipples of a tanned and chiseled clothing model splayed out on the window before him—but only by the sound of his name sounding so beautiful, so ethereal, so absolutely, ground-quaking, heart-stoppingly gorgeous with Keith’s pretty little tongue wrapped around the letters of it.

Keith pushes out another sigh, reaching forward as though to jostle him into coherence, but Lance takes a step back. He shakes his head to clear his thoughts, waves both hands in front of him in a quick and fretful surrender. He wills down the heat spreading fast over his cheeks, wills away the thoughts of Keith so pretty, so slender and seductive, stretched out over a wide bed and encased with silky pillows. How he might look in the low, dark light of a room just like the ones pictured on the posters, thighs open, head propped lazily on his shoulder, beckoning Lance forward with a single jerk of his index finger. His lips pursed in a sly smile, his eyes twinkling with a hot, all-consuming lust.

There’s a time and place for these thoughts, and it’s definitely not here and now. It’s definitely his dorm room late at night when he can’t sleep, or the locker room when he’s alone—or nowhere, really. At no period in time. He shouldn’t be imagining what it might feel like to climb on top of his very kissable boss. And he definitely shouldn’t be doing it while said boss is standing within arm’s reach, already looking as though he wants to strangle the second life out of him.

“I—I’m listening, I promise, sorry,” he’s sputtering so quickly and so unfocused that he sounds even to himself as though he might be drunk, “I just—it’s… it’s just kinda… disorienting out here.”

Keith sighs, crossing his arms over his chest. He taps his foot once, then twice, and drags his glare up to the endless blue sky. He narrows his eyes at it, at the fluffy, white clouds. At the tips of buildings so high up that they seem to cut directly into the atmosphere. At the bright, white sun that casts long shadows from his eyelashes down the high slope of his cheeks.

And he says, slowly, quietly, “I know. It’s okay. Shiro was right. The first time is kind of hard. But… it does get easier. I promise.”

It’s the first tender thing that Keith has ever said to him, and through the heat that it fans out over Lance’s skin, through the thumping of his heart, rattling in his chest, through the sudden tightness of his throat and the return of those stormy emotions that had possessed him in the locker room this morning—

Lance memorizes how those words sounded. He catalogs them for later on. He reminds himself that Shiro thinks that Keith has a soft spot for him—that everyone around the office sees it too, and he wonders why.

What can Keith possibly see in him? What could he have done in the brief lapse of time that they’ve spent together to impress him?

What does Keith know about him that he’s still too stupid to see too?

“Well,” Keith says then, clipping off the end of that train of thought, neat and clean and instantly cauterized, “We’re collecting the soul of an old lady today, got it? It’s an easy enough job, but sometimes it can get a little tricky.”

There’s a group of tourists taking photos in front of one of the giant posters in the window of the Abercrombie store. They’re holding up peace signs, and rabbit ears behind their friends’ heads. They’re dressed in jackets and beanies. They have long, colorful scarves wrapped around their necks. Lance thinks about a world in color. He thinks about what sorts of clothes he must have worn when he was alive. He wonders if he was stylish.

He wonders what his family must have done with his things when he died.

Keith is still speaking. He struggles to catch up, to follow the trail of the clipped edges of a sentence that he missed, and connect it to whatever Keith is trying to tell him right now.

“-ome people put up a fight, you know, when they don’t wanna leave their families behind. They want to watch over them, which is nice and all, but if they stick around for too long, they’re stuck here as ghosts. We don’t want them to be ghosts, so… we have to do whatever it takes to get them to come along.”

The buildings around them reach up toward the sky. They’re black against the light of the sun. They’re titans, lording over the ants of people scurrying about. These people, so busy and so dulled to the amazing world that they’ll spend so little time in. Lance wishes that he could tell them to cherish it. He wishes that he could tell them to stop and look around them because they never know when it’ll be over. They’ll never be able to recover these fleeting moments when their ticker stalls, their life ends, and they won’t even have the memories to understand what sort of life passed them by.

“—the hard ones are people who have someone who they don’t want to leave behind. This woman is a widow, so we’ll probably be able to convince her to come so she can see her husband again. But the easiest people to convince have died in accidents. They’re so shocked that they’ll listen to anything that you tell them.”

Keith stops then, gives him a strangely pointed, strangely sardonic look.

“ _ Most _ people don’t even think to ask if anyone is okay,” he practically spits, staring at Lance hot and hard, as though he might reach forward any second now and slap him for reasons that Lance cannot possibly hope to understand, “but  _ sometimes _ —rarely—some people will fight you, and they won’t leave until they’re sure that whoever they’re leaving behind is okay.”

Lance feels oddly put on the spot, as though Keith has some kind of grudge held against him that he could never hope to comprehend well enough to mend. But the moment passes once Keith shakes his head, once he pushes out another deep breath and checks his watch again.

“She’s about a five-minute walk from here, at the hospital up the road. She just died, so we should be able to get there just in time. If we leave now.”

He has Lance by the wrist again, leading him through groups of people that he doesn’t even bother to navigate around anymore. There’s no sensation accompanying the strange _ ‘whoosh’ _ of passing through a physical person, but Lance still discovers that he dislikes it on pure principle. No one shudders or turns around, no one seems to notice that they’ve phased through them at all.

But something about it feels strangely intimate—being inside of a person, for a mere moment. In a Hollywood rendition of this afterlife, he imagines that all of these moments might result in him accidentally possessing someone. Or, at the very least, jarring them for a split second from their phones or watches, or their thoughts of their busy day, just to shiver and shake, and wonder where the sudden chill that crawled up their spine must have come from.

Thankfully, their ghostly forms seem to be stripped of the Hollywood glitz and glamour. They arrive at the hospital without incident. Keith continues to hold his wrist until they’ve hopped on the elevator alone after a small group of nurses files out. Lance does notice, however, that a few of the staff on the next floor seem confused as to why the elevator opens once again, even though it appears to them that no one is inside.

Keith lets go of his wrist again, just as the doors close and he begins to fiddle with his watch. Lance flexes his fingers. He hates that he’s already missing Keith’s warmth, almost as much as he hates the idea that Keith is surely only grabbing him because he thinks that he might wander off like some kind of irresponsible child. But maybe, he hopes, Keith has trained other people before him. Maybe Keith just has so much experience with runners on the first day that he’s keeping particularly close tabs on Lance, in hopes that he won’t try to make a break for it and exist as a part-time ghost among so many living people.

That sort of life seems miserable at best, absolutely idiotic at worst. But, in his imagination, maybe he’s being punished for a misstep in the past, and not because Keith has so little faith in him to stay on task long enough to see this through to the end that he’s practically leading him on a leash.

But now they’ve arrived at the floor that Keith seems to sense is the correct one for them to get off on. He grabs Lance’s wrist once again, leading him through the doors and ignoring the curious looks from the nurses when, from what they can tell, the elevator is inhabited by no one. Lance almost laughs when a few of them mutter about talking to the maintenance man about fixing that problem.

Keith leads him along, turning down a long hallway as though he’s made this journey to this particular place many times before. His footsteps are absent of the echoey clatter that Lance imagines a human might make in all of this empty space. They make their way to the door, three away from the end of the hall, and Keith pauses before he reaches forward and wraps his fingers around the handle. He turns then, slowly, to Lance.

“Are you ready?” He asks. Lance gets the sense that he hasn’t been forced to consider someone else’s feelings very many times before. He’s awkward, stilted, in the way that he asks it, but even in the overbearing light of this hospital, even in all of this pristine white, he somehow still looks beautiful.

Lance swallows hard.

He nods once, then twice. He’s trembling now, so hard that he knows that Keith can feel it, but neither of them mentions it.

And finally, Keith pushes open the door.

Inside, the first thing that Lance notices is the thick crowd of people, all wrapped around a single bed. He then notices the sniffles and the crying, the voices quiet and muffled, the thick veil of sadness, oppressive and heavy as it settles firmly over the group. And at the corner, Lance sees the translucent figure of an old woman, with her arm slung over the shoulder of a sobbing girl. She’s whispering things to this person, who doesn’t seem to hear her. She’s smiling sadly, her eyes twinkling with unshed tears. She’s making a point of looking away from the bed, gazing instead at the faces of the people all around her. She seems as though she’s trying to reassure them. She doesn’t seem even remotely worried that no one around her seems to sense her there.

Keith lets go of Lance’s wrist. He draws nearer to her, reaching out the hand that had, just moments ago, grasped at Lance’s skin.

She turns to him, still smiling. Her brows are drawn close together. There are laugh lines embedded deep in the corners of her eyes and her mouth. Lance gets the feeling that a lot of people loved her. He feels a sudden sense that she lived a very long and happy life.

“It’s time now, isn’t it?”

Keith’s head tilts to the side. Lance can’t see his face from his spot behind him, and he can’t imagine what sort of expression he might be making right now. He wonders, instead, what the reaper who collected him might have said to convince him to come along. He wonders if he was an easy soul to catch, or if he’d made their job harder.

He wonders who he might have left behind, and how difficult it might have been for him to do so.

“You lived an extraordinary life,” Keith says then, his voice even and practiced, but sprinkled with something soft, and gentle, something that Lance thinks sounds foreign for him, “But your husband is waiting for you now. He wants to see you again.”

She reaches forward then, her smile still sad. Her eyes still glassy. She’s shaking, too, but she doesn’t look back. Their fingers lock together, and Lance feels as though he might cry.

These people who she’s left behind, this world that she survived in for so long. He doesn’t know what any of it means. He doesn’t know what people live for, what they love for, when eventually, everyone will someday die, and forget, and leave this whole bright and colorful universe behind.

On the bed, through the bodies surrounding it, Lance catches sight of a still, veiny white hand. It’s resting, unmoving, on the white sheets. Someone is reaching forward to hold it. Keith is passing him, heading for the door.

“Lance,” he calls flatly, “Come on. We need to go.”

And, just like that, they leave this woman’s entire existence behind them. And not once, Lance notices, do either of them look back.

Their sniffles and cries feel newly-branded in the back of his thoughts. He feels sincerely that the sight of that motionless hand lax on the sheets will haunt him for the rest of eternity.

When he steps out of the door, instead of the halls that he’s expecting, those white walls, the spotless floors, the clean, bleachy scent scratching at the back of his throat, he’s greeted by the bustling grand hall of a train station. Keith is a little ways ahead, still holding the woman’s hand and guiding her along. She’s quiet now, as though in a trance. No one says anything, and Lance feels momentarily as though that veil of sadness might have tangled around all of them. As though they brought it with them out here, to this bright and busy and overwhelmingly thriving place.

Keith continues moving forward, and Lance continues to lag behind. Unlike earlier, Keith doesn’t seem too concerned with whether he runs away or not. He seems entirely focused on the task at hand, as though the people around them, the music, the sights and smells and sounds—as though they’re nothing but background noise. As though nothing matters but getting this woman wherever it is that she needs to go.

And soon, they arrive at a long, blank wall. Keith steps up again, fishing a set of keys from his pocket. He places his free hand on a random, unassuming stretch of wall. He lifts the keys, unhanding the woman for a short period of time. He presses the tip of one against a single, innocuous brick that he seems almost to have selected blindly. Lance stands still then, just a few feet away. He watches this strange series of events unfolding before him. It’s perhaps the weirdest thing that he’s witnessed since he died, and maybe the only bizarre happening that’s managed to actually startle him. Keith, to his credit, hasn’t been involved with most of the oddities in the afterlife. Until now, Lance thinks. Until he’s tapping a random key against a random brick on a white wall, acting as though he somehow has the ability to conjure a lock to put it in right out of thin air.

Lance almost says something—almost laughs, almost makes a joke or asks one of the hundreds of questions that are swirling around in his head. He almost steps up and grabs Keith by the shoulder, questions his mental state and whether or not he slept enough and if maybe he’s having his inevitable mental lapse after working at such a stressful job for such a ridiculously long time. But before he gets the chance to do any of this, as though in the blink of an eye, a giant, ornate, two-handled door appears where there was once nothing.

Lance rubs at his eyes. His breath stalls in his throat. He should be used to this by now, he thinks. This shouldn’t surprise him at all. But he’s overwhelmed, suddenly, when Keith pulls the door open. When it reveals a track on the other side, housing only one train. It’s an older, fancier, one-car train. It’s golden, glimmering in the sun. Lance feels as though he’s seen this train somewhere in the past, but there are heavy curtains hanging over the windows, obscuring his view of the interior. His heart pounds in his chest. His blood feels heavy in his veins.

Keith turns to the woman, places a gentle hand on her back, and urges her towards it.

“It’s time to meet your creator,” he tells her, “She’s excited to see you again. It’s been a long time.”

And with that, they watch her together, as she ambles, slowly, to the staircase leading up into the car, and she doesn’t turn to wave goodbye. She gives no indication that she remembers them behind her at all.

The sun, the gold, the warmth, and the noise behind them all coming together into one thick, dizzying blur of overstimulation—Lance is rattled from his drowning thoughts and the overwhelming nostalgia by the scream of the train’s whistle, and the chugging of the wheels rounding the tracks as the train slowly heaves away.

Keith turns to him then, his frown flat, his eyes dark and deep and his cheeks brushed pink with an emotion that Lance couldn’t discern even if he wanted to.

And he says to Lance then, “It gets easier. It might not feel like it now, but it does.”

Lance feels as though he’s heard that too many times now. He chokes on everything that he’s feeling, the emotions churning and curdling in the hot bile rising like acid in his throat. His arms hang loosely at his sides. His shoulders heave, and the pocket watch in his hand feels so heavy that he might drop it if he weren’t holding it so tightly.

He thinks about those crying people around that bed, about the still, white hand. He thinks about the smiling girls taking photos in front of the Abercrombie posters, the thriving city, the sun sitting so high in the sky.

And the words that he speaks barely feel like he’s talking. His voice doesn’t sound like his voice. He feels more like a rumbling thundercloud of emotion than a trembling ghost of a human, invisible to everyone but Keith. So small and so helpless to have changed any of the terrible things that brought him to this specific spot at this specific point in time.

“Don’t you ever wonder though, like… who you were before this? Like, those marks on you—they’re horrible. It looks like you were blown up, and… and you just don’t—you don’t care? You’re never curious about why we had to forget everything? Like, you told her that her husband is waiting for her, but is he even going to remember her? Will she remember him? What’s the point of all of this if we can’t even remember the people who mattered when we were alive? I—I don’t even know what my mom looked like. I don’t remember what it felt like to love someone—I-I don’t even know if I had a family, so what—what does life even mean if we can’t—if it doesn’t mean anything to us once we’re dead? How—how can you possibly feel good about yourself when you just did the same shitty thing to an old lady that someone else did to you? H-how am I supposed to live with myself, knowing that my whole life now is just—just making other people as miserable as I am?!”

Keith watches him for a long moment after that. The train, Lance notices from his peripherals, has disappeared along the track, leaving behind nothing but a long trail of white smoke, rising slowly before disappearing into the blue sky.

Keith steps back from the doorway then. He pulls the large doors closed again and presses the key once more into the lock. Slowly, it fades back into the blank white of the wall. Through his emotions, through his embarrassment and sadness and the profound sense of loss that’s suddenly overcome him, Lance doesn’t have the will to even be surprised anymore.

But then Keith pockets his keys, and he turns back to Lance with something peculiar in his expression. His brows are pulled low, his lips bent downward at the sides. His eyes, too, are shinier than Lance has ever seen them, and Lance wonders if he mourned his lost memories as well. He wonders, guiltily, if everyone else is just better at hiding their sadness than he is.

“Stop worrying about it.” Keith’s voice is low and gravelly when he speaks. His hand, to Lance’s surprise, rests momentarily on his shoulder. “It’s better not to worry about it. You can’t change it, so you just have to learn to accept it, and… that, too, gets easier. I promise.”

They don’t speak to each other for the rest of the day.

They return to the office, and Shiro is extra nice to him when he visits to review his progress. They have idle conversation. Shiro laughs when he brings up the Abercrombie posters and the girls posing in front of it. He makes a point not to mention the soul that they collected, and Keith signs papers quietly at his desk the whole time.

But later on, two hours before the end of their shift, when Keith leaves to get refreshments, the mug that he then sets in front of Lance is warm, and steamy, like always, but it smells sweeter than before.

When Lance raises it to his lips, when he risks a taste, he’s surprised to find that it’s hot chocolate in place of coffee.

Keith doesn’t look at him, buries his face in his paperwork and pointedly doesn’t bring it up.

And Lance, for Keith’s sake, doesn’t either.

But he can’t stop himself from smiling, and he can’t stop the sudden warmth fanning out in his chest from chasing away at least some of that clouded misery that followed him here from the hospital room.


	5. Bezel

The next four weeks of Lance’s life can be defined by four separate events. These individual situations, cut apart from the regular, surprising monotony of being a reaper in the afterlife are the sole moments that will later be representative of who he will become as a reaper. Frankly, they’re really the only experiences worth remembering among a slew of paperwork, break room gossip and long hours of overtime that amount to nothing but sore muscles and a headache that feels as though it might never go away. These events, however, break up the tedium of a desk job, of a blank office. They’re the times when he’s truly felt alive, born anew, inspired by the bleak other world that he’d woken up in to go forth, make changes, and rattle the walls around this place with a talent and determination the likes of which they’ve never seen.

But really, if he’s being honest with himself, these moments do less to amp him up and more to distract him. Beyond being the building blocks that might someday craft him into a complete person, a better reaper, a more talented and loyal servant of their great white hooded God—

Mainly, they’re just the four events that lead him to falling desperately, irrevocably in love with Keith.

The days that they train together feel as though they’re no more than a few hours in one week. They fly by, faster than Lance can grasp at them. He finds himself growing more comfortable around Keith, in his silence, with the silly little things that he does to show that he cares when words, he might think, would be so clumsy and unpracticed that Lance might misunderstand them.

They come to a silent agreement to get along. Lance gives him space and doesn’t pry too often. Keith cuts him slack when he makes mistakes. He still brings him hot chocolate when he’s had a rough day. He still says nothing when Lance wishes him a good night at the end of their shifts. They collect more souls. He learns the ropes. He even manages to convince a few hard cases to come along with them when Keith struggles. But, at first, he flounders. At first, he stands back and just watches, uncomfortable and unwilling to take part in something that he still disapproves of so completely. It still manages to make him feel sick to his stomach when he thinks about the fact that they’re leading these people away from the lives that they’ve spent years building. That they’re going to force them to forget everything while lying through their teeth to them with promises of reuniting them with loved ones who have long since passed, and long since forgotten about them as well.

Keith doesn’t seem completely immune to his judging looks either. A few times, after he’s helped someone through the door towards the waiting train, he’s caught Lance’s eye and prickled almost visibly. He’s hunched his shoulders and opened his mouth as though he might say something, but he never does. He always just spits a breath and shakes his head. Lance wishes that he would make this easier by trying to start a fight. He wishes that Keith would give him the invitation that he needs to start this conversation.

And he asks him sometimes if Keith knows who reaped his soul. He imagines that Keith must know the answer. It could be any number of the reapers who talk so casually to Lance in the break room, deceptively friendly while knowing deep down that they did this to him.

But Keith always tells him that it doesn’t matter.

_ “Someone would have reaped you anyway,”  _ he says, _ “You died. No ifs ands or buts about it. The only certainty that you need to worry about is that you’re dead now. There’s no changing it. So who cares?” _

Which is true enough, sure. He definitely has a point. But Lance still can’t help but feel as though it might help anyway. If only he could ask them what he was like when they picked him up. If only he could have some example to compare himself to now, to understand how he’s supposed to act as a new version of himself. To finally have a name or a face to attached to the empty, desperate longing that still writhes hollow in his chest while he lies awake deep in the night.

Keith can’t possibly understand it. Keith doesn’t care about anyone or anything but this job. Lance decides that he’s too distracted by paperwork to worry much about the world that he left behind when he got blown up or torn apart, or whatever nasty thing must have happened to him to create those awful, deep lines of gold in his skin. Keith seems anything but curious about it. Lance suspects that his distractions are keeping him blissfully in denial about that as well.

And over time, Lance learns to distract himself too.

He spends his evenings chatting with Hunk in his dorm or listening to Coran ramble in a busy mess hall. He spends his mornings agonizing over whether or not he should rise early for a chance to sneak into the locker room and hear Keith sing again.

And in his private, lonely moments, he rehearses the words that he can remember of that song. He can still hear Keith’s warbling voice in his memories, bouncing off of the walls and muted in the steam and the hiss and patter of the shower heads beating water onto the tile floors. But he’s always too much of a wimp to do it. He never garners the nerve to ask Keith if he can even just write down the lyrics. He never has the strength to explain to him that he still has yet to hear any music clearly aside from that—and he’s cherished it, all this time, because it’s the only thing that he’s encountered so far that’s managed to make him feel more connected to the living world.

But, on the morning in particular which will someday define the next four weeks, Lance has slept in. The night before, he’d stayed up late helping Keith catch up on paperwork, and he’d learned, with much frustration, that Keith often stays behind to help his coworkers when they’ve taken on workloads that prove to be too much for them.

He isn’t sure how someone as prickly as Keith can be so good at this job, but time and time again, Keith manages to get the deceased to follow behind him seemingly effortlessly, when Lance has heard the horrors in the break room from the other reapers, who seem to have compiled a conspiracy that Shiro only assigns the easy ones to Keith.

And maybe Lance, at one point, might have started suspecting so as well.

Maybe he might have considered that Shiro does seem to be fairly close to Keith, and he visits often—sometimes with snacks, and sometimes with gossip that Keith always waves off and reprimands him for sinking low enough to care about.

Keith  _ does _ seem to have an easier time than anyone else, Lance has to admit. Most people, he notices, take one look at Keith and agree to follow after him without putting up much of a fight. It’s surprising, the first time that he hears one of their coworkers complaining about a runner. He’d been worried too, when he’d first started training, that most people would try to dash away. They’d think that they could escape death. Keith had assured him that most people don’t. Most people have some belief in the afterlife that compels them to follow anyone who seems to be in a position of authority once they die. Lance had come to understand that their job was more about directing them to the right place than convincing them, but when that single peer’s story had inspired a whole conversation of horror stories about the newly dead running away, assaulting them, or fighting back and screaming, he’d been faced with the realization that not everyone had it quite as easy as himself and Keith.

But today, as his alarm blares for the fifth time and Lance finally manages to nod awake long enough to panic at the realization that he’s already fifteen minutes late—today will be the first day that might finally put things into perspective and lay his doubts in Keith to rest.

And it might make him realize, finally, once and for all, that Keith might just have a knack for this that no one else around them has ever managed to pick up on.

Maybe that’s why Keith is clearly Shiro’s favorite. Maybe that’s why things appear, from the outside, to come much easier to him than they do for anyone else.

For now, he practically flies out of bed. He scrambles around in the dark, undressing hurriedly and pulling on his work clothes. He stops only when he hits his shin violently against the edge of his bed, but even then, he only allots a good five seconds to jumping around and cursing fretfully, before he decides that he’s wasted too many valuable minutes and he needs to get to work.

He foregoes brushing his teeth and showering, promises himself that he’ll stop by the locker room during his lunch break to get cleaned up, but for now, he needs to get to work. In all of the time that Keith has worked with him, he’s always there before Lance even clocks in. And it seems, if Shiro’s expectations in Keith and everyone’s general opinion that Keith is some kind of suck-up are any indication, it’s been a very long time since he’s been tardy at all.

So Lance barely takes the time to make sure that his outfit is in order. He runs down the halls quickly, barely avoiding colliding with a few people who don’t notice him in time to move out of the way, and apologizing profusely when he shoves a few to the side, eyes zeroed in on the office door that he can now make out at the end of the hall—determined to get there before his fifteen minutes become twenty, and surely Keith loses any inkling of respect for him that he’s worked so hard to build up over the last week, since they started going out on jobs together.

He practically slams through the door when he reaches it. His heart is thundering in his chest, and it takes him a moment to feel properly mortified when he realizes that he’s just scared Shiro, on the other side, so terribly that he’s spilled the coffee that he was just reaching out to offer Keith all over the floor in front of his desk.

“I—I’m sorry, I—I’m late, I—”

Even with coffee-covered arms, Shiro smiles in that same gentle, welcoming way. And he laughs then, bending down to grab the fallen mug from the floor.

“Everyone sleeps in from time to time, Lance, it’s okay. Not everyone can be a robot around here.”

When he rises, he drums his knuckles against the surface of Keith’s desk, as though to make things perfectly clear that his words were a well-aimed jab at one person in particular. In response, Keith sends him a hot glare, before flipping a little bit harder to the next page of the documents that he’s busy filling out.

“Just start on your papers, intern. Being late isn’t an excuse to get behind on your work.”

Lance nods, sharp and jerky. He shuffles quickly to his desk, sliding into his chair and pulling himself closer. His hands are still shaking when he reaches for his pen, and the first few initials that he marks on the documents are jagged and barely legible.

Shiro clicks his tongue as he looks over the dark stain of coffee on the floor, but Keith tells him that the janitorial staff will probably just steam it from the carpets.

“You’d think that we’d have some kind of magic to take care of this,” Shiro says, turning his head to the side, as though to inspect the mark more thoroughly, “You know, like… self-cleaning carpets? Pens that can do paperwork for us? Tickers that catalog themselves?”

Keith scoffs.

“That sounds like heaven,” he says, “You forget that we’re in Hell.”

Despite the shiver that runs up Lance’s spine at those words, Shiro laughs. He tosses the cracked mug into the garbage, rubbing his sticky hands together.

“And yet, you choose to stay here instead of moving on. I wonder why that is, Keith? Do you think you’d be happier if you hadn’t have taken this job… or do you think you’d just be bored?”

Keith doesn’t respond. Lance wonders if it’s really as easy as simply filling out a request to retire to the afterlife. He wonders, if he were given the same decision to make, if he’d stay here or choose to move on.

Something tells him that he’d stay, and he hates that he considers how lonely he might feel in the afterlife if his days weren’t spent admiring Keith’s pretty face from afar.

“So you’re taking Lance out on the field again today?” Shiro asks, turning his head slightly to catch Lance’s eye—smiling that handsome smile, friendly and warm despite the large stain of dark coffee currently growing dryer and only more obvious on his shirt. Lance resists the urge to smile back. He tries his hardest to keep things professional, focusing instead on his paperwork. “He needs to get plenty of practice before he goes out on his own.”

Lance wonders then, while Keith and Shiro chat idly about the parameters of their job, if Shiro will give him special treatment as he does with Keith. He wonders if that might be better or worse than being one of the regular employees.

He knows that Keith eats his lunch and takes his breaks here, in this office. He knows that no one seems to talk to Keith at work except for Shiro and sometimes Coran. He doesn’t do anything on his days off—sans for whatever he gets up to in his own dorm room and staying over to finish his work in the office, and Lance isn’t entirely sure if anyone knows much more about him than his name and his position here. He’s positive that no one but himself has seen those golden engraved death marks, and no one seems curious about him in the least.

They’ve ostracized him because of the preferential treatment that Shiro gives him. They’ve sensed that the power dynamic here is uneven, and they aren’t willing to consider that perhaps Keith can’t help it that Shiro has taken a liking to him, and he’s determined to give him the easier jobs, despite how capable he might be of tackling something harder.

At least, at this moment in time, that’s what Lance thinks. And it’s a weird thing to consider, when Shiro seems so nice right now. When his intentions seem so pure, when he seems so honest and good. Lance can’t imagine what he’s getting at. He has no idea what he might be gaining from putting Keith on a pedestal while apparently screwing everyone else over, and he decides that, perhaps, Shiro doesn’t even know that he’s doing it.

Lance wonders how one would go about reporting sexual harassment in an afterlife work space. He wonders if he might have to consider doing just that, on Keith’s behalf.

Shiro leaves the office after he finishes reminding Keith of some deadline or meeting that’s coming up soon. He sends Lance a small wave and another winning smile as he opens the door and steps out. Lance struggles to keep his goodbye even. He has a hard time keeping his nervousness out of his expression before Shiro closes the door.

But soon after, Keith pushes himself back from his desk, rising from his seat. He hasn’t touched the breakfast pastries that Shiro left sitting on his desk today, but he still wipes at the front of his dress shirt as though to rid it of crumbs. He turns to Lance then, the same unreadable expression settled over his features that Lance has long since gotten used to by now.

And he says, in an even voice with no discernible inflection, “Are you ready to go? We have a lot of work to do today.”

Lance has no way of knowing now that, later on, he’ll be fighting for his afterlife against a foe somehow stronger and more agile than the both of them put together. He has no way of understanding that all of the ideas that he’s built up over the previous weeks about Shiro’s apparent soft spot for Keith have been completely false.

And he doesn’t understand that he’ll very soon realize that maybe Keith’s job seems so easy because, generally, he’s just really good at it.

But, very soon—pretty much as soon as Keith leads him through the door and towards a bustling city street where traffic is backed up around an accident—he gets the message loud and clear.

Keith warns him en route that this person died in a pretty gruesome way. He says that their target was a high-ranking businessman in life, traveling by town car to his cushy office job. Today would have been the day that he’d find himself closing on perhaps the biggest deal of his career. He doesn’t react to Lance’s comment about irony, doesn’t even correct him on his misuse of the term, but he does take a little bit of extra time to explain to Lance how important it is to collect spirits even if they aren’t particularly willing to come along.

“There’s a lot of paperwork to fill out if someone gets away,” Keith tells him, “But… even worse, for them, I guess… they’ll be stuck here for the rest of eternity. Alone. Unable to communicate with anyone in the living world. Those ghosts that people talk about on TV—they’re not real ghosts. All of that crap from paranormal shows, where they talk to the spirits and everything? It’s made up. Real ghosts don’t have a way to reach out. They just wander… forever. And they might not understand at the time what a horrible, lonely life that’s going to be when all of their loved ones move on without them.”

Lance wonders then if that’s why forgetting is necessary. He wonders how he might have felt if he’d moved on and his grandfather wasn’t there waiting for him. How his mom might feel, whoever, wherever she is—if she’s already on the other side or if she’ll pass someday in the future—and he just isn’t there. And she has no way of knowing if he’s just a reaper, working here for the rest of his existence. Or if he’s stuck as a ghost wandering the Earth forever, just because he didn’t want to leave them behind.

He shakes his head. They’re nearing the accident now, and Lance winces at the sight of it. There are nearly five cars all crashed into one another, smashed up like an accordion held tight on each side. They’re crumpled to the point that they’re almost indistinguishable from one another, just cracked metal and streaked colors. Just a myriad of broken glass sparkling on the pavement and thick clouds of smoke billowing up into the sky. One of them has been flipped over, and the police around the scene are struggling to shield the gory details from curious and impatient onlookers, just trying to find a way around the scene so they can arrive at their individual destinations.

As they draw nearer, Lance forces his eyes away from the limp, doll-like body of a man crushed under one of the cars. There’s blood everywhere—glinting red and wet in the morning sun. It’s warmer today than it was the last time that they traveled to the living world, and that blood, stained into the pavement, seems as though it might soon start sizzling.

Lance feels the remnants of an almost-memory tugging at the back of his thoughts. For a moment, he catches a glimpse in his mind’s eye of someone frying eggs and bacon over a small, creaky stove. The faces around him are all blurred out. Their mouths moving, scribbled over. Their words are slow and croaky. And the moment is over entirely too soon.

He can feel it humming in his brain like static. His breath catches in his throat. He can almost make out the smile of the woman, holding up the frying pan and asking him to grab a plate for her to put it on.

Keith is tugging him forward by his wrist again, jarring him from his thoughts. He says Lance’s name low and slow, jerking his head in the direction of a translucent figure that’s pacing around the accident and yelling loudly, as though he doesn’t realize that no one can hear him.

“I’m going to be late for work, jackass! Can these idiots please move their cars?!”

Lance already feels dread pooling in his belly. Keith doesn’t seem to have tapped into the empathy that Lance has seen him extend to other deceased in the past.

As they near the guy, Keith lets go of Lance’s wrist and moves closer.

Everything happens very quickly after that.

The guy seems panicked when he sees them. Keith can barely get a word in before he’s screeching that he can’t die today—he can’t do this right now, he doesn’t have time. He’s a very important person, they need to understand this. He can’t just drop everything on the best day of his life. He can’t just die like any other average joe. He isn’t a normal person, he isn’t going to take this lying down.

He punctuates this by shoving Keith back roughly, spitting these words so ferociously in Keith’s face that little specks of saliva spatter from his bared teeth, his open lips. Once he throws Keith back, he stumbles, floundering desperately in his attempt to flee from them. Lance almost laughs at the speed which with Keith lunges forward and grasps him around the waist, slamming him to the ground. He might have imagined in life that reapers were more graceful, but Keith is flailing on the ground now, fighting the guy down, struggling to pin him. And he’s yelling the whole time, practically telling the guy off as he attempts to explain to him that he’s not going to be able to clock in today—or ever again, for that matter—and that staying behind is only going to result in something terrible happening that he’s going to regret sooner than he realizes.

“You need to  _ calm down _ —” Keith shoves the guy’s shoulders flat onto the pavement, his words pointed and firm and every bit as authoritative as he doesn’t look right now. “—and just come with us, got it? You’re not some hotshot anymore, okay? Your mangled corpse is right over there, idiot! Squashed like a bug under all of those cars—and there’s not gonna be another workday for you! You can just... move on! Just be dead! Go—go to the other side and see your mom, she’s—she’s waiting for you, asshole!”

The guy knees Keith in the general direction that he must think is Keith’s groin, but he misses by a few inches. Keith presses his own knees into the guy’s upper thighs, and Lance is having a whole lot of trouble reading this particular scene as anything but… perhaps a lot more dirty than he should be, given the circumstances.

Lance realizes that he probably should be helping, considering how disheveled Keith looks, how he’s scuffed up and his clothes are torn. How the guy is now attempting to reach up and bite him, as though he’s tapped into his more feral side in the sheer panic and desperation to get to work and close on whatever big business deal is waiting for him.

Lance knows that death doesn’t wait for anyone. He knows that it doesn’t care if you had your whole life ahead of you. It doesn’t care if you have a loving family to leave behind.

He draws in a deep breath, taking a step forward. And he swallows thickly, his hand clutching his pocket watch to his chest. He can feel it ticking against his skin, through his dress shirt, mingling with the subtle pattering of his pulse that’s felt more like the residual kicking of dying energy in his veins that what he remembers that a heartbeat should feel like.  

“You need to come with us,” Lance tells him, “I’m sorry… but you’re dead. And if you try to stay behind now—you’re… you’re gonna be stuck here forever. And Keith says that you’re never going to be able to move on if you don’t come with us now. It’s not fair, but… that’s just how things work.”

The guy pauses, fists balled in Keith’s shirt. He cranes his neck to glare at Lance around Keith’s heaving body, his eyes wide and red-rimmed, his cheeks so washed with color that he seems even more vivid than the blood painting the pavement around them.

“What would you know, huh? What are you guys, like, fifteen? Do you have any idea what the real world’s like? Did you even have anything worth staying here for? How the Hell are you gonna tell me that it’s better to move on when you didn’t even live a fulfilling life?”

Lance decides that he wants to have a go at the guy too. He hopes, privately, that he somehow manages to throw Keith off just so Lance can deck him right in his stupid, cocky mouth.

But before he can do anything, Keith is leaning downward. He’s pressing his mouth to the guy’s ear, whispering something to him in small, hissed clips that Lance can’t hear over the bustle of the busy streets and the sirens of police cars and ambulances crying out into the caged jungle of the city. Lance isn’t a fan of how intimate the scene before him looks, and he finds that he much prefers looking even at the death and calamity of the car crash over watching Keith straddle this stranger and whisper sweet nothings into his ear.

So, when Keith somehow manages to coax him into submission with those private, breathy words, Lance’s mood is suddenly so sour that he can’t even commend him for a job well done. Their walk to the train station is quiet, tense. The man, now, seems as though he’s caught in the same trance as the old woman—and the few other deceased that Lance has followed behind Keith to help move to the other side.

After they usher him to the train, once Keith closes the door, he takes a moment to situate himself again. He wipes the back of his sleeve over the dirt on his cheeks. He straightens out his dress shirt and re-buttons a few of the parts that have come undone. He checks his watch, noting flatly that they’re a little bit late, but they still have time before the next person on their list dies.

And Lance can’t stop himself from asking, finally. Even despite his poor mood, his childish pouting at the sight of Keith getting so up close and personal with another person—the sudden revelation that Keith’s job isn’t always so easy finally comes crashing down on top of him.

“Hey, what did you say to that guy to convince him to come with us?”

Keith’s eyes are hard when they meet his. His cheeks flush softly—a nice, subtle pink. Lance likes the shade of it on him, but he forces himself to focus on the task at hand, and this apparent insider knowledge that makes Keith so much better at this job than anyone else.

“I lied, I guess. I told him that we could bring him to the other world in one piece, or two. It was up to him. Then I told him that you really liked the cutting part, so he should watch his step with you.”

Lance can’t stop himself from laughing. It spits from his lips before he can even manage to collect himself, and he nearly doubles over with it.

“He really bought that?” Lance asks then, with deep, uneven breaths, “Like, that I’d do something like that? That we could even cut up a ghost?”

Keith’s smile is wry, and his cheeks grow pinker.

“You were giving him a pretty intense glare at the time, so… I think he just figured that you were really ready to maim him. Why were you looking at him like that anyway? You looked like you were ready to kill him.”

Lance’s good mood is immediately cut short. He crosses his arms over his chest, his skin alight with heat, his veins on fire.

He flicks his gaze away—to the people passing through the busy train station around them. To the sun cast yellow through the wide, overhead windows. To the fat, white clouds in the deep blue of the morning sky.

“He—he was just rude, okay? I mean, who says that kind of thing to the people who are trying to help them?”

“Yeah, but… you didn’t start really giving him dirty looks until I started whispering to him…”

Lance jerks away, taking off in a random direction, despite the fact that he has no idea where their next job might be.

“We’re gonna be late, right?! Why are we messing around here, when—when we could be working? Come on, Keith, God, we… we gotta go!”

At the very least, Keith allows him to drop the issue without incident. Eventually, he catches up to Lance and turns him in the right direction. And he tells him, just before they reach their next job, “Hey, I… I know that you think this is always easy, right? Like… you think that this guy is the only difficult job that we’re going to have, but… He’s not the worst. And you need to be ready for that. The other reapers keep fooling themselves into believing that every job is supposed to be simple, but you need to learn to read people. And to figure out how you’re going to get them to come with you in like, a split second. You’re not bad at it, but… just… never fool yourself into thinking that this job is going to be easy, because… it’s not.”

Lance allows those words to sink in. He allows himself to consider that maybe he’s been too hard on Keith from the beginning. He’s taken the word of people who he can speak to more casually, the words of people who seem easier to talk to, to hang out with—all because Keith is generally more prickly. Because Keith is harder to get to know.

But he wonders where it all started, where it stemmed from. If Keith has always been more distant and the distrust blossomed because of it, or if that distance grew between him and their peers because of his obvious talent for this job.

And he wonders if, in life, Keith could have been just as alone as he is now.

But he decides, as he follows Keith to their next job, that he’s going to do something about all of this.

Whatever it takes, no matter how embarrassing and thankless of a task it might be to tackle, he’s going to make sure that Keith isn’t so alone anymore.

And it’s not just because he’s obviously falling hard for the guy—of course not.

That crush, and Keith’s beautiful smile, his charming laugh, they’re just the perks that come along with this particular job.

Week one teaches Lance that their work isn’t always going to be easy. And that Keith, without a doubt, is maybe the most skilled reaper that he’ll ever meet in the afterlife.

And it inspires in him a newfound meaning:

He’s going to make something of himself. He’s going to be a person worthy of Keith’s pride, his friendship, and maybe, someday…

His love, too.


	6. Keywound

The second of Lance’s defining weeks is more innocuous than the rest. It starts out with a good night’s sleep: with Lance rising fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off, giving him enough time to get ready and take his shower, brush his teeth, and get dressed before he needs to clock in. He makes a quick stop on his way to Keith’s office in the mess hall, where he picks up a breakfast pastry and marvels at the churning of orange and pink clouds behind the large glass windows fitted at the furthest point of the wall. There’s no scenery around here to admire, the way that there was on Earth. There aren’t skyscrapers so tall beyond the windows that they seem to be reaching down from the heavens. There aren’t billboards or giant monochrome posters of half-naked men. Nor are there crowds of chatting people, rainbows of brightly-colored umbrellas or scarves and winter hats. There’s just smoke, forever writhing, thick and unpassable, just behind the glass. The swirling vortex of nothingness beyond their tiny world here changes hue with the time of day. Alluding, Lance thinks, to the peculiar, undisclosed location where they might be situated.

He hasn’t taken much time to ponder exactly where they are, but he’s suspected for a few weeks now that they might be housed somewhere near the gates of heaven. And heaven, he supposes, has always been depicted as a high up, cloudy place just above the dark atmosphere, the fiery bell enveloping the planet Earth, the sun, the distant planets, and the stars. And maybe this place is invisible to humans just as the door leading to that secret train is invisible to anyone who doesn’t have Keith’s set of keys. Maybe their entire universe here exists just beyond the reach of the naked human eye, and he might be closer to everyone who he loved in life than he’s given himself the opportunity to consider prior to this single, serene morning.

He makes his way to Keith’s office just as the morning crowd begins to file into the mess hall. He raises his hand, and his half-eaten pastry, in a small wave when he sees Coran, and he can’t stop himself from smiling when Coran belts out an overly-excited morning greeting.

“The early bird does indeed get the worm, my dear boy!” Coran practically sing-songs at him, “But in your case, I’d suppose that it’s more of a very delectable bear claw! Can you imagine, Lance? A bear caught in the claws of an early bird? How delightfully absurd! How absolutely ridiculous!”

Coran’s weird sense of humor earns a few laughs from the tired workers passing between them. Lance himself offers an awkward half-smile, ducking away and rushing towards Keith’s office in fear of finding himself caught in another one of Coran’s windy nonsense speeches that have a penchant for lasting a few hours too long.

Lance had asked Keith days before what happens to all of the birds and worms and the cats and dogs and sewer rats when they die. He’d asked Keith, only half-joking, if there were animal reapers who came down to Earth to harvest those souls as well. Keith, not known for his humor in any sense of the word, had only looked at him blankly, telling him, deadpan, to stop asking stupid questions and focus instead on his work.

But they’d passed roadkill on their way to the train station later on. Lance had wondered if he’d ever lost a family pet to the unforgiving highways that might have twisted and turned around a place that might have once been his home. That had been another hot chocolate day. That had been another time when Keith had sensed the deep recess in his chest caving further in, and remedied that hopelessness in the only way that he knew how. Lance has grown to appreciate Keith’s quiet consideration of his feelings. He feels less pressured to make sense of his sadness when someone isn’t asking him how or why he feels it.

It seems now, to Lance, that Keith treats him with something sweeter and more comforting than the coffee that he still throws out on the days when his mood seems exceptionally bleak. He presents these small peace offerings only during those moments when perhaps someone else might clap a hand on Lance’s shoulder, or wrap him up in a hug. He doesn’t ask to talk about anything. To the untrained eye, he might not seem interested or concerned by Lance’s fluctuating moods at all.

For whatever reason, Keith hasn’t retained that particularly human trait like many of their coworkers have. His popular nickname among their jeering, jealous peers during their short breaks and water cooler visits—”Robo”—feels metallic and sour in the back of Lance’s mouth. He knows that Keith can feel things. He knows that Keith generally cares very much about the souls that they reap and the people who they share this small living space with. He’s just more private with those feelings. He’s more wrapped up in himself—folded together like an old letter on faded parchment, tender and breakable to the touch, and so he chooses, instead, to hide away.

Keith seems less like a mystery and more like a sad and lonely, lost person the more times that Lance catches him gazing out into the thick, endless abyss beyond the curtains in his office. Sometimes, albeit rarely, he’ll become so engrossed in whatever thoughts are warping his expression into something so solemn, so sad and faraway, that hours will pass in this dissonant silence until Shiro comes in with his offers of coffee and snacks.

And Lance begins to get used to that, too. He realizes that Shiro knows Keith’s rhythm even better than Lance himself does. That he understands how often Keith needs to be pulled out of whatever thoughts are weighing so heavily on him so he can focus on the task at hand.

Lance wonders how many of his nights staying late at the office are spent just watching that invisible point deep within the writhing fog. And he wonders what Keith sees there—what must be materializing just beyond the reach of anyone else’s sights that tempts him away from the here and now. Be it memories, like Lance’s brief flash of breakfast simmering on a stove, or wherever he must have learned the lyrics of that beautiful song.

But Keith, reliably, divulges information about himself sparingly. He doesn’t explain to Lance what distracts him. He never brings up their embarrassing and unfortunate meeting in the locker room. He never tells Lance why Shiro visits so often, or why he sometimes gives Lance hot chocolate instead of coffee, or why he’d been so adamant that Lance wouldn’t want to remember who he was before he died.

And Lance, eventually, decides to take his word for it.

No one ever admits it in so many words, but the rumor perpetually revolving around the office is that in the event that a reaper breaches their contract and breaks the white hooded figure’s rules, they will be punished not by being banished. Not by being reset or disintegrated, or held away in some afterlife version of prison.

The white hooded figure won’t wipe away the remaining memories still written in faded ink in their heads. She won’t hurt them. She won’t berate them, but they’ll be punished in a way that Lance isn’t sure is really a punishment at all:

They’ll be forced to remember everything that they left behind on Earth.

Lance doesn’t want to think about this anymore. So, instead, he focuses on greeting his coworkers on the way to Keith’s office, all the way at the end of the hall.

When he opens the office door, it’s quieter inside. There’s a clock ticking faintly on the wall just behind Keith’s head. The blinds are drawn closed, and Lance wonders if that’s because Keith doesn’t want to be distracted today, or if perhaps he didn’t like what he found floating in those clouds when he peered out. The plant by Lance’s desk hasn’t grown or withered the entire time that he’s been employed here. He wonders, guiltily, if he’s been throwing his undrank coffee into the plastic roots of a fake fern, and if eventually, it will start to smell and the janitorial staff will be so annoyed with the two of them that they’ll tell Keith what Lance has been doing with those mugs every time that Keith so kindly offers them to him.

He takes a seat at his desk, finishing off his pastry before he wipes his hands and takes a look at the stack of papers already waiting for him. They’re the same basic documents that he’s been filling out since he started here—detailed recounts of various soul-collecting jobs, containing the information about the deceased, the difficulty level of retrieving them, and the time at which various reapers managed to corral them to the train. He’s always wondered if any of this was really necessary. He’s felt as though, for a supposedly omnipotent being, the white hooded figure really requires a whole lot of paperwork for something as simple as venturing over to the living world and collecting the spirits of the dead before they linger for too long.

But it gives him an excuse to not go out on the field today. Which he appreciates more than he thought that he would. The living world still overwhelms him, still dizzies him with a resounding sense of vertigo for hours after he returns here. He feels weaker and more tired every time that he ventures out, but Coran and Shiro have both reassured him separately that he’ll get used to it with time. Sometimes, Coran will call him a baby spirit, which he doesn’t like very much at all. But compared to some of the reapers here, he understands that he must seem ridiculously young. His life had been cut short in his youth back on Earth, and here, now, he’s only been in the afterlife for a little less than two months compared to the centuries that workers like Coran have spent toiling away in this realm.

He still isn’t sure about Keith. The reapers who venture into the living world, he’s learned, seem so much more in tune with the current times. They’ve watched the world change around them for years now, given themselves the opportunity to become immersed in the culture in order to connect with the dead more efficiently. But Coran seems as though he’d been plucked from a decade long before Lance was even born. Coran speaks and carries himself in a way that Lance could imagine fitting perfectly in an old-timey black and white film. He’s never been positive if that’s because Coran is really that old, or if he’s just weird.

And Shiro, he isn’t so sure about either. He can’t imagine Shiro living in any time and place without standing out. He’s too big, too handsome, too knowing and calm. He seems to Lance as though he’s more of an angel that’s existed in this afterlife since the white hooded figure plucked his ticker from the hands of whoever must have crafted them before Hunk. As though he might have been created for the sole purpose of guiding them through the treacherous journey of harvesting souls without the memories of a life once lived to comfort them.

But Shiro wears a death mark painted in gold, just like everyone else. And Keith, despite his robotic reputation, was torn apart and re-seamed just like Lance, and Hunk, and Shiro, and every other reaper before them has been.

And Keith, again, is a difficult case. His fleeting conversation is devoid of any discernible accent, any slang or peculiar phrases that might give Lance even the smallest hint as to when he’d died. He dresses in the same dark suit as everyone else. He doesn’t bother with his messy mop of hair, doesn’t style it or cut it, or present himself in a way that might allude to some fashion statement from some particular century. He can imagine Keith in a newsboy cap and a thick tweed coat just as easily as he can see him rocking flannel and ripped jeans at some garage grunge concert. But he can also picture him in high-waisted pants, with slicked-back hair. In a dark, tight-fitted leather jacket. Or splayed out naked and wanton on a mattress in monochrome just as those men on the posters had been.

He allows his thoughts to linger on that mental image. Soon enough, he forgets what he was even curious about.

He zones in and out of awareness for a few hours, until he reaches the last page of his paperwork. A look at the clock informs him that it’s been nearly half of his shift, and when he stretches, cracking his back and rolling the kinks from his shoulders, he realizes that Keith’s been finished for quite some time now. They aren’t scheduled to make any Earth visits today. As far as deaths go, Keith had warned him last night that things would be fairly dry for them for a while.

He understands that time moves differently in this universe. And he isn’t sure exactly how many days or weeks or months pass in living time between each of their visits there. But sometimes it’s summer, and sometimes it’s fall. Sometimes it’s daylight even when the night is black and thick and indecipherable outside of Keith’s office window. Fleetingly, Lance has remembered how much he must have loved the rain in life when they venture through the closet portal and a consuming sense of nostalgia washes over him at the sight of a myriad of raised umbrellas. When water splashes against paved streets and cars hum past and sprinkle them with droplets from puddles that pass right through them as though they’re made of smoke.

Lance, right now, can think of nothing but how charming Keith had looked among the rain that passed through both of them—how easily he could imagine at that moment, Keith venturing from a bookstore into a cafe, sitting quietly by a window with his chin in his hand, ignoring a steaming mug of coffee as he watched the moving world around him with that same lost stare that he wears while gazing out of his office window.

Lance could place Keith then—in the world, among the living. He could see him as a model on those vast Abercrombie posters, as a musician or an artist, or a pretty face among a crowded coffee shop. He could imagine that once, he was a smiling tourist taking photos with friends in front of towering skyscrapers, that he might have held up peace signs or rabbit ears behind his friends’ heads. He might have laughed when he looked at the photos that they took together. He might have been happier than he’s ever seemed in death.

And now, he’s watching Keith again. He’s thinking about him wearing a cozy, comfy sweater—thinking about him cuddling with a significant other on a wide, plush couch, watching television in the evening. Thinking about him eating something that isn’t pastries or plastic-wrapped deli sandwiches from the break room vending machine. Thinking about him living as a human in the real world, existing in an unpoppable bubble of contentment, unaware of what might have awaited him in a short-lived future, at the end of a startlingly brief moment of life.

Keith is staring at the closed blinds, perhaps imagining the ever-lingering shadow that catches his attention on bleak and bleary, boring days such as these. And Lance is watching Keith—wondering how happy he might have been in another life. Wondering how it might have felt to meet him if their paths had ever crossed before Lance died.

Keith turns to him while Lance is caught in these musings. Like a fly wriggling in molasses, like a mouse caught in a glue trap, Lance can’t pull himself out of his thoughts quickly enough to avoid the embarrassment and the hot spread of color under the surface of his skin. He can’t stop himself from staring at Keith before Keith is looking at him curiously—flustered and offended—and asking him in a stilted, fretful voice what he’s staring at and what’s wrong, and if he has anything on his face.

And the words leave Lance before he can stop himself. Before he can compose the emotions skittering inside of him like a thousand tiny fire ants.

Without thinking, in a voice free of uncertainty, crisp and clear and edged with a confidence that he’s never felt in anything since the day that he woke up here—

“You’re beautiful.”

The stain on the carpet has faded from the deep black of Keith’s spilled coffee to a lighter shade of brown. The light through the curtains is striped against the walls—grayscale, writhing with the living clouds that move like ocean waves just on the other side of the glass.

The plant by Lance’s desk is rubbery and robust. It hasn’t grown, but it hasn’t withered. The soil in the bottom of the pot is dry now, spared, for now, from the long-since cooled coffee that’s sitting in an untouched mug on Lance’s desk.

The door is heavy, ornate, and oak. Unopened. Lance can hear the bustle of a busy work day just beyond it, but Shiro hasn’t visited them in a while.

And Keith, at his desk piled with countless documents that he’s finished and forgotten long ago—Keith is staring at Lance now with wide eyes, red cheeks, and a jaw so loose and lax that his mouth has fallen agape.

“That—” He stops, clearing his throat and tearing his eyes from Lance to his fingers laced together on the surface of his desk. “That’s… inappropriate, intern. I’m—I’m—”

There’s silence then. All excuses and reassurances and apologies are smothered under the weight of Lance’s regret. He knows that nothing that he could say right now could remedy the horrors that just tumbled from his lips. He knows that, successfully, deftly, he’s just toppled down every semblance of mutual respect that he has so painstakingly built up between them over the weeks that they’ve worked together.

He knows that Keith is probably going to tell Shiro and that Shiro will soon lose respect for him too. He knows that it probably won’t stop him from still admiring Keith anyway, and who knows what evils are resting in his psyche now, just waiting to leap out and further damage his reputation at any given opportunity.

Keith flounders, Lance craves for the release of a second death.

And the clock on the wall ticks, and ticks, and ticks.

Lance clears his throat, then he draws in a deep breath. Then he looks at everything in this plain, boring room, but the single work of art that is Keith’s rose-tinted cheeks. Or his wide eyes. Or those pretty lips still slack until he draws the bottom one between his teeth.

Lance shakes his head.

“I—I’m sorry, I—” He bites off the end of that sentence. He isn’t even sure where he’s going with this, but he knows that he has to say something if he hopes to pick up the remaining shattered pieces of his already damaged character in Keith’s judgmental eyes. “I mean—not… not for what I said, I mean… you  _ are _ beautiful, but… you’re right, I probably should have… waited until work was over to say it.”

He’s tapping his fingers restlessly against the top of his desk now. His heart feels as though it’s bound to beat right out of his chest. He dreads whatever Keith might say to him now—how he’ll reprimand him for stepping out of line, how he’ll judge him for the feelings that he’s felt culminating in his heart since the very first time that he wandered into this office behind Coran and reveled in the beauty of Keith’s beautiful face.

And since then, he’s fallen for that warbling song and the subtlety of Keith’s kindness, the tenderness that he extends to their deceased when he’s gently prompting them to follow him to the other side.

Lance has found, over the last couple of months, that Keith is the only thing that he catches himself looking forward to in the following days, every night when he goes to sleep. He finds that many of his days off are spent wondering what Keith might be doing all by himself, biding his time until the next time that they’ll meet—feeling positively alive with nerves at the sole idea of being able to exist as the single person who holds Keith’s attention for one fleeting stretch of time.

And he can feel all of those hopes and dreams and fantasies of an eternity spent happily at Keith’s side crumbling now—until something cracks in the air around them. Until it’s bubbling out into the silence, shattering the glass of Lance’s self-hatred that had risen to encase him in his own self-imposed prison of regret.

When Lance’s eyes meet Keith, the breath feels knocked out of his lungs. He feels as though the entire universe has been paused now, as though every moment that he’s lived until now has been existing in muted gray scale, and Keith’s smile now—Keith’s gorgeous, musical laughter—it’s bled color into everything.

Lance’s cheeks feel warm. His heart thumps in his chest.

And Keith, through his laughter, asks him, “Do you rehearse this crap in your dorm before work, or is this really how you talk all the time?”

Lance doesn’t understand what Keith means by that, not at first. At first, he thinks that maybe it’s a not-so-thinly veiled insult. He thinks that maybe it’s a jab at how bad he is at collecting his feelings and keeping things to himself.

But Keith’s happiness is contagious. Keith’s smile is so pretty that he could say just about anything to Lance right now and Lance would accept it dutifully and with much appreciation.

So, instead, he tells Keith that he just makes him dumb like this. It’s all Keith’s fault, and he has no idea if he was this stupid or useless in life, but Keith’s sure managed to bring it out of him now.

And if this only makes Keith more embarrassed, Lance chalks that up as a victory. If it only makes Keith’s laughter sound more beautiful, Lance decides that today was the best work day that he’s ever had so far.

And this day, from now on, stands in infamy in Lance’s heart:

As the first time that he made Keith laugh.

As the first moment that he realized that he’d never want to move on to whatever lies behind that big, heavy door—not if it meant forgetting someone like Keith.


	7. Oculus

The third life-changing week of Lance’s time spent training with Keith is far busier than any of the weeks previous. It begins with his alarm blaring once again, bright and early on another Monday morning after a weekend spent biding his time with petty distractions until he could see Keith again. It begins with Lance barely giving himself enough time to get dressed before he’s flying from his dorm down the winding halls to the office area, ignoring the rushed morning greetings that wisp by him faster than he can react to them.

Historically, he’s never had many problems when he’s in a hurry, save for a sore shin or bad breath, or his clothes seeming a little more out of order than he usually might prefer. Sometimes, Keith raises an eyebrow at the wrinkles that he can’t quite smooth out of his jacket, or the bedhead that he slinks off to the locker room later on the wet down. But this Monday—this first day of a terrible, regretful week—he ventures into Keith’s office and interrupts Keith and Shiro’s conversation. He’s barely awake when he does so, and more frazzled and winded than he’d prefer to be in front of either of his bosses. He thinks that this might be the worst of his problems, foolishly, before everything swiftly goes downhill, starting at this exact moment in time.

Instead of greeting him with that same warm smile, that small wave, the comforting words of reassurance or information about whatever task they’ll be embarking on today, Shiro can’t stop himself from laughing.

“Lance,” he says then, low and cracked as though it’s taking every ounce of his willpower not to burst with that laughter, “It’s not even casual Friday.”

Lance knows for a fact that anything even as mundanely entertaining as “casual Friday” doesn’t exist in their line of work. For whatever reason, even the reapers who never leave this office and never interact with the deceased face-to-face are required to always be dressed as though they’re rearing to enter an important business meeting. He isn’t sure if the white hooded figure just enjoys watching them all wander around stiffly in clothes far less comfortable than the hoodies and sweatpants pants that he can envision in his most forbidden office fantasies. Or if perhaps there’s a good cosmic, Godly reason for them to have been given five different starchy, uncomfortable suits at the beginning of their rebirths that they must wear at all times while on the clock, but Lance finds that he shouldn’t be worrying about the idiosyncrasies of their boss’s motives when Shiro is still struggling to mask his giggles and Keith is staring at him with a ferocity that might be hot enough to fry an egg on his skin.

It takes his exhaustion-scrambled brain a few extra seconds to catch up with his current predicament. Shiro is holding a hand over his mouth, his cheeks are pink and his brows are drawn close together. He’s nearly sitting on the edge of Keith’s desk, and there’s a box of Lance’s favorite chocolate-filled pastries opened there, inviting and tantalizing and too far away.

Keith, seated just behind the desk, is just as stunning and sour-faced as ever. A single thick brow is raised and his lips are pursed to suit the theme of his disdain. He’s looking at Lance with the same flushed indignation as he’d offered him when Lance had accidentally exposed himself in the locker room, and Lance’s frazzled thoughts are having a lot of trouble understanding why.

Until, finally, he follows the trail of their shared gazes. Down, over the front of his shirt with the mismatched buttons. Over the white button-down underneath that’s come untucked in his haste. Over the spot where his belt might be looped if he hadn’t forgotten it, to—

Immediately, mortification fills him. He’s an empty cup poured to the brim with a bitter mixture of regret, humiliation, and self-deprecation.

He’d made a point of polishing his shoes last night before he went to bed. He’d thought that maybe they could look as nice and shiny as Shiro’s always do. He’d ironed his jacket, too, thinking about how Keith’s always looks nice and firm and pressed as though he’s taken good care of it. He’d picked up a few face masks from the commissary booth that Hunk had directed him to—marveled at all of the nice things that he could grab for free, before Hunk had informed him, laughing, that everything in the afterlife has to be free since they aren’t getting paid to work here.

But the point is that he’d put a lot of effort into looking nice today. Keith had alluded to a full schedule on Friday. He’d told Lance that they’d be “spending a lot of time together for a while” which Lance had, of course, taken as his cue to up his game. Up close and personal with Keith, he didn’t want even a single hair to be out of place. He’d stayed up so late fretting over his things that he’d fallen asleep not on his bed, but slumped against the edge of it, threading a needle painstakingly through the tattered edge of his jacket sleeve, where it must have caught on something while he was working.

He doesn’t blame Keith for not appreciating all of the secret work that he put into looking nice today. He doesn’t blame him for rolling his eyes and clicking his tongue before returning to his work.

Lance worked himself weary to present the best picture of himself possible to his boss and potential love interest today, but it’s all for naught. It was a silly, useless venture that he regrets ever thinking was a good idea.

Because Lance, the miserable, useless idiot that he is, has neglected to change out of his pajama pants.

He’d like to claim that they were the acceptable, generic ones that Coran had gifted him when he’d first arrived here. He’d like to say that he has no clue whatsoever what the big deal is because frankly, they aren’t that different from the dress pants that he should have put on instead.

But with his trip to commissary, along with the face masks and a few random odds and ends that he wanted more than he needed, Hunk had lovingly pressured him into picking out a nice novelty pair of pajamas that he’d decided were much too soft and luxurious not to wear while he mended his shirt last night.

They’re red with little yellow bee hives littered all over them. Between the hives, in loopy, honey-coated letters, they say, just big enough that he’s positive that at least Shiro can read it:

_ Honeybuns. _

He’d laughed at how lame and ridiculous they were when he’d seen them. Hunk had coaxed him into taking them on the basis that no one but the two of them would ever know.

And they _ are _ soft, he has to admit. They’re far more comfortable than anything that he’s worn since he died.

Keith doesn’t seem nearly as smitten with them as himself and Hunk had been. His voice is soft, but firm, devoid of any affectionate playfulness or amusement that Shiro’s had just seconds ago.

He scoffs, turning hard eyes to Lance and pinning him in place under the weight of that unrelenting, unforgiving gaze.

“Are you trying to start a new fashion trend, or have you just stopped caring about this job?”

Lance already wishes that he could end this week and go back to his dorm. That he could suffer through the residual embarrassment over the weekend, and maybe come back fresh-faced on Monday—ready for the reset that Keith seems to force on them every Friday evening, in which they never discuss anything that happened between them the previous week.

He wishes that he could at least go back just fifteen minutes ago, to that moment when he’d shoved up from the floor and hurriedly gotten his things together if only so he could remind himself to put on some appropriate pants.

“Be nice to him, Keith. He obviously just forgot. I’m sure he’ll go back to his room and change during lunch.”

Keith is filling out the last of a small pile of paperwork on his desk. He doesn’t look up as his pen scribbles against the parchment.

“Well, we have jobs to do  _ now, _ so I hope the people who we’re collecting today find this as funny as you do.”

Lance stops himself from asking why he can’t just go back to his dorm before they leave and change. Shiro doesn’t bring it up either, so he feels as though there’s probably a very good reason for that. He knows that once they arrive at work, it’s generally frowned upon to leave unless there’s some kind of emergency—which is what everyone has told him in the past, and they each laugh about the fact that there’s never been an emergency big enough to actually give someone a good reason to leave their stations. And what could happen to them, really? They’re dead already, and they have no loved ones or relatives that they know about who might need them.

They, themselves, are unable to be injured, and they can’t even get sick. Lance feels suddenly tightly tethered to the reality that he’ll be toiling away at a 9-5 for the rest of eternity without the hope of ever sneaking a few sick days to break up the monotony. He wonders if there’s some sort of afterlife union that he might be able to get ahold of. He wonders if there’s the potential to amass vacation days, and what he’d do if he actually did get any extra time off, aside from sitting boredly in his dorm room and waiting for the boring, directionless drag of non-work to end, as he already does now.

Meekly, he makes his way to his desk. When he slides into his seat, he’s relieved to finally have the bottom half of himself out of view. Keith continues filling out documents, and Shiro continues to chat to him idly. The two of them seem content to let this awkward situation slide, and Lance is more than eager to join them.

Despite his persistence to allow his mortification to fade away, he can’t stop the intrusive thought that nags at the back of his brain. It’s a memory of the now cursed moment when he first laid eyes on the pants and decided to show them to Hunk. When he’d felt how soft they were and dug through the rest of the pile to see if there were any prints that were appropriate enough to buy.

The patterns on all of them were embarrassing in some shape or form. The beehives were the tamest that he could find. Hunk had laughed then, telling him to get them anyway.

_ “Who cares, it’s not like anyone but us will know that you have them,” _ he’d said,  _ “And if you bring someone back to your dorm and they find them, they’re probably gonna be attracted to your honey buns anyway, right?” _

That is, unfortunately, not the case. As much as he’d like to delude himself into believing it, Keith's eyes have never appeared to travel anywhere near his aforementioned “buns” and he definitely can’t imagine the guy calling them anything even remotely similar to “honey” or even…  _ sweet _ .

This leads him down a winding path of memories, of all of the times that he’s sneaked a guilty peek at Keith’s backside while they’ve been on the job. The suits that he wears aren’t snug enough to give much away, but Lance has always imagined that he’d look nice in something tighter. And he wonders what sorts of pajamas Keith wears to bed. He probably still has the generic pair that he must have been given when he started as an intern himself. Unless, maybe, they’ve grown too worn and tattered by now, but no one has ever seen him lingering anywhere beyond his dorm during his time off.

Lance is considering how he might feel about Keith sleeping in the nude when he’s startled from his thoughts by Keith’s barking voice.

“Stop falling asleep, intern. We have work to do.”

And he convinces himself, fretfully, that Keith doesn’t care enough to wonder why his cheeks are suddenly so dreadfully pink.

He draws in a deep breath, focusing instead on the paperwork waiting for him on his desk. He wonders if he can draw this out long enough that they won’t be able to leave for the living world until after lunch. If maybe he can buy himself enough time that he won’t be forced to parade around only half-dressed for the entire duration of the morning.

But, as fate would have it, the two sheets don’t take him very long. Shiro leaves them with a small wave, a handsome, comforting smile, and a quiet,  _ “Good luck!”  _ whispered behind a cupped hand at his cheek. On days when Keith is in a particularly sour mood, it’s a game that he plays. He pretends that he has to be sneaky about his cheerfulness, as though Keith has the power to reprimand him for extending such courtesies to Lance when Keith himself will probably brood for the remaining seven and a half hours of their shift.

Keith has never mentioned it in the past, and today is no different. Sometimes, when Lance looks to him after, he’s scowling down at his papers. Sometimes he’s rolling his eyes. His anger is always devoid of its usual fire, too, Lance has noticed, as though he’s in on the joke as well. As though Shiro’s purposeful jest at his own expense is a private game between them.

Lance doesn’t want to think about how jealous that makes him feel, or how petty and childish he is for feeling it. He doesn’t want to mourn Shiro’s absence immediately after he’s gone, as the sole buffer between himself and the guillotine named Keith just waiting to fall down over his exposed neck. He knows that all of his ill-fortune today is his own fault. He knows that he did this to himself, that his blind hubris will be his proverbial and perhaps even literal downfall.

He’s given Keith many reasons to lose respect for him. He’s given Keith many reasons to never want to be his friend.

He knows that, once again, he’s ruined everything. He’s accepted that, grown accustomed to it. But he’d thought, foolishly, that maybe he could change things between them for the better if only he could begin changing himself.

He’d failed, of course. He should have known better.

The room is silent and the air between them feels thin and strained beneath the weight of Keith’s familiar quiet. Lance’s pocket watch, thankfully tucked in the breast pocket of his jacket, ticks quietly against his chest.

Wordlessly, Keith rises from his desk and pushes his chair under it. He makes his way to the closet and fiddles with his watch, stopping only to send Lance another hot look when he sees Lance watching him dumbly instead of coming across the room to stand next to him.

“Are you coming?”

His words are brief and clipped and dripped in poison.

It’s going to be a long week.

Lance scampers so hurriedly up from his chair and around his desk that he almost slips and falls over. He brushes his hands over his clothes as though to smooth out the wrinkles, feigning a confidence that he definitely doesn’t feel as he draws nearer.

Keith spares him only one final, judgmental look before they step through the threshold of the closet. He doesn’t say it in any words, but his scowl translates very easily into a heated hiss of, _ “You really couldn’t manage to even dress yourself appropriately?” _ that stings more in silent, unspoken form that Lance imagines that it would if he’d said it out loud. At least if he’d spoken it, Lance could defend himself. At least then, maybe, he could salvage the last scattered remnants of his ego as Keith closes the closet door behind them.

But he distracts himself from his embarrassment by admiring the side of Keith’s head instead. The bright flash of the closet as they transport to the living world illuminates all of the subtle brown hues in Keith’s dark hair, lighting up the violet flecks of color in the deep dark of his eyes. He stands just a few inches shorter than Lance, despite Lance’s dreams and memories always making him seem so much taller—always making it feel as though he’s towering so high above everyone that Lance could never hope to reach him.

Keith shuffles forward and opens the door once again. Outside, it’s chillier. The cold seeps in through the fabric of Lance’s pants, through the small slivers of exposed skin at his wrists and around his throat, where his jacket doesn’t shield him. It must be winter, Lance thinks. The city streets are powdered with freshly-fallen snow. The passersby, unaware of their presence, as usual, are bundled up in coats ranging from jet blacks to vibrant reds and yellows, wrapped in scarves and thick, wool hats that look so cozy that Lance is tempted to try reaching forward and snatching one for himself.

He wonders if they’re moving forward or back in time. He wonders if they’re marching in a straight line at all, or if maybe they’re bouncing around to different days, different decades, different centuries seemingly unchanged on Earth. He knows that no one in the office but Keith ever stays over on weekends, and he knows that Keith very rarely makes trips to the living world even when he’s working overtime. But he also knows that living humans don’t wait to die until the work week. So there must be some sort of time travel involved in this job. And the seasons don’t hop around so sporadically on Earth, either—so much so that a single day might be spring and the next autumn. So touch and go that within one single shift it might be night and day three or four times, back to back.

He wonders if Keith has any idea how any of this works. He wonders how long he’s been working here that he doesn’t even seem to question it anymore.

Keith doesn’t usually snag him by the wrist these days when they leave for these jobs, and Lance still hasn’t decided if he misses it or not. On one hand, it does feel good to consider that maybe he’s worthy of being trusted. Maybe Keith has enough faith in him after watching him work and learn and contribute at least a small part to this job that he doesn’t feel the need to babysit him anymore. But he has to admit that he misses the comfort of warm skin against his. He imagines that, at one point, he was probably a child who loved being held by his mother. He might have had siblings who he loved to hug. Maybe a father who would pat him on the back after he did well in soccer or hockey, or whatever sport his long, spindly muscles might have been crafted in such a way to make him good at.

At times, he’s taken long looks at himself in the steamy locker room mirrors. He’s ignored the stain of faded gold bruises on his skin, and just studied the bend of his muscles and the arch of his brows, his baby face, the subtle crease in his cheeks that a frown makes, or a smile, or a purposefully engineered motion of a laugh. He wonders in those moments how he might look to other people. He doesn’t remember anymore if anyone called him ugly or cute when he was growing up. He doesn’t know if his mother might have, at one point, threaded her fingers through his hair and pinched his cheeks, and told him what a handsome young man he was growing up to be.

He knows that, technically, Keith is beautiful. He’s been gifted with all of the makings of an aesthetically attractive face. Even the people in the office who don’t like him much will sometimes refer to him as “The Pretty-boy Robot”. Sometimes they’ll say that a kid with a nice face can get anything that he wants, even in death. Lance knows that he doesn’t look like Keith, and no one tells him in person that he’s been given the easiest mentor because of his looks. He isn’t sure if they whisper it behind his back in the same way that they gossip about Keith, and he doesn’t know if perhaps they’re wondering why Shiro offers him gifts of coffee and sweets when his appearance definitely doesn’t compare to Keith’s well-renowned beauty.

But he’s sure that he was athletic. He’s toned in places that a runner might be, a swimmer, someone lithe and agile who might have spent long stretches of time being active. He knows that he’s narrower in the shoulders than Keith is, that he must not have spent as much time lifting weights. And that there are the beginnings of smile lines forever creased in his skin, that stretch out in an especially prominent way when he pretends to laugh.

So he knows, in some shape or form, that he led a happy life. He must have left behind people who loved him very much. And maybe he loves the feeling of Keith’s hand on him because it reminds him of those almost-memories. Or maybe he just likes it because he’s very attracted to Keith.

It doesn’t matter, in the end, because Keith doesn’t do it anymore. And they’re walking now, down the sidewalks, barren of many people in the chilly weather. The bitter cold of the soft breeze around them makes Lance regret his forgotten dress pants even more than before. The fabric is thicker in those, he knows. He might have been shielded, at least a little more, from the frosty winter air. Keith doesn’t pay any mind to his suffering, and Lance wasn’t expecting for him to anyway. He simply walks just a step or two ahead, checking his watch at random intervals before stopping unexpectedly in the middle of the street.

He’s looking now at a tall building that appears to be abandoned. He checks his watch, then looks back to the dilapidated remains of what Lance thinks must have, at one point, been an apartment complex. Keith’s eyes linger on the rotting wood nailed over the entrance and the crumbled bricks of the foundation for a short lapse of time, as though it might change its current form to something else, something fresher and more recently lived in than the downtrodden husk that they’re both grimacing at now. He looks at Lance, confusion evident in the pursing of his lips, the bending of his brows. There’s color sitting cute and subtle at the tip of his nose and the apples of his cheeks. He’s picturesque even as he’s standing here, absolutely bewildered by nothing more than an empty apartment complex. He’s hard not to look at, even as his gaze falls from Lance, gradually, to the sidewalk just a little way up the road, and the untouched, snow-powdered street.

“Is everything okay?” Lance asks, anxiety suddenly coiling tight in his belly. “Are… are we lost?”

His eyes momentarily fall on the big, red “CONDEMNED” sign hung with yellow tape across the doors. Keith doesn’t respond more than muttering angrily under his breath, cursing in small, forced hisses that sound a lot like Coran’s name.

“He’s always doing this,” Keith grumbles, tapping his foot quickly against the ground, hands shaking as he continues to fiddle with his watch, “ _ Ninety-nine-point-nine percent accurate _ , my ass! Unless that last percent is just fucking up  _ my _ cases alone!”

Keith looks lost here, suddenly. He looks as though he wants to do a dozen things at once. Instead, he simply stands in place, continues the rapid, apprehensive tapping of his shoe against the pavement, all while looking at his watch as though it has the ability to change anything.

“Keith,” Lance presses, drawing only slightly nearer and extending his hands as though he might ever be brave enough to rest it on Keith’s shoulder, “Hey, buddy, what’s wrong—”

Keith whips his attention in Lance’s direction so quickly that Lance almost jumps back. He glares at him for a single moment, face screwed up in his anger, cheeks stained dark crimson as the corners of his mouth twitch in rage.

He draws in a shaky breath a moment later, seemingly talking himself out of taking his newly-found sour mood out on Lance. Lance is thankful for that for a myriad of reasons, but he forces himself to stay focused, instead, on the problem at hand.

“We need to ask for directions,” Keith tells him slowly, practiced but still clumsy with anger, “Coran got the time of death right, the person, everything else, but… he always gets the location wrong. If it’s not a hospital or some street corner, he’s completely useless.”

Lance doesn’t entirely understand how Coran could mess something like that up, since, until this exact moment in time, he’d assumed that all that Coran did was literally grab the tickers, find the file, and send them off to the reaper wing to be reaped. He hadn’t realized that Coran actually had a hand in filing his own set of paperwork, or that messing up said paperwork could result in such a calamity taking place.

Keith sucks in another shallow breath, pushing it out in a slow, tapered way that Lance reads as a futile attempt to quell his rage and think straight long enough to finish this job. He taps his watch once again, fingers ghosting over the button labeled “G”, before he turns his head to Lance, teeth biting into his bottom lip for a split moment before he speaks.

“This complex moved recently,” he says, low and stilted as though he’s about to tell Lance some particularly bad news, “Usually, if Coran messes up, there’s some truth to the wrongness. So… if we can talk to someone and find out where they moved this building, we should be able to find our person in time.”

Lance remembers Shiro’s warning about the buttons on the watch. He remembers wondering idly when they’d ever need to appear to living beings, when their work, thus far, had seemed so cut and dry. He realizes that it’s a backup plan, a margin for error. That perhaps Keith has been forced to do this many times before because Coran has a penchant for messing this sort of thing up. And he realizes, finally, belatedly, that this means that, for the first time, he’s going to be forced to be visible to real, living, breathing human beings.

Of course, today of all days, when he’s dressed in his newly-tailored suit, crisply ironed dress shirt, and a pair of fuzzy pajama pants with little beehives printed all over them.

He resists the urge to ask Keith if he can sit this one out.

Instead, he pulls his pocket watch out of his breast pocket. He turns it over in his hands, inspecting it as though it’s changed at all, wondering what sorts of things this little piece of seemingly innocuous machinery could do if he knew it quite as well as Keith seems to be familiar with his wristwatch. His eyes flick from the G to the S, from the hands moving now at normal speed from digit to digit, different from the slow creeping of it when he finds himself staring at it back in his dorm.

He licks his lips, trailing his gaze to Keith. And Keith watches him, eyes mapping out his expression. He seems to be waiting for some cue, some affirmation that Lance is ready to take this next big step. Lance wonders if any other reaper at their job would care so much about how he might feel. He wonders if this is what everyone means when they say that Keith has a soft spot for him—that he’s worried when this should be just another part of the job, that maybe it’s too much for Lance to handle.

And Lance decides, that right now, he cares so much more about making Keith proud of him, impressed, even, than he cares about his first time speaking to mortals since he’s died falling on the same day that he decided to flaunt his stupid novelty pajama pants for everyone to see.

“Do—do we both have to do it at the same time, or—”

Keith rolls his eyes, pressing down on the G button on his wristwatch. He shakes his head then, seemingly unchanged when Lance was expecting some sort of dramatic transformation or even a bright flash of light. Lance, without allowing himself much time to think about it, presses his as well. A sudden dizziness overtakes him, and the world suddenly feels much colder, much heavier and bright and loud and  _ everywhere _ , but he, too, seems to be relatively unchanged by it. He sways in place somewhat, and he isn’t sure if he’s more embarrassed or pleased when Keith’s arm reaches out to steady him.

“It takes some getting used to—”

“But it gets easier eventually, right?”

The dry upturning of Keith’s lips at his question is definitely worth speaking through the sickening throes of his sudden change from ghostly to solid form. Once he stops feeling as though his dinner is going to shove up and out of his throat, he tests his feet against the concrete. There’s a clicking sound where his feet meet it. He casts a dim shadow out behind him, where he’d never noticed until now that there wasn’t one before.

He turns around on the spot, lifting his arms then dropping them down to his sides. It feels different now, just enough that every movement is a new experience that he’s trying, quickly, to grow accustomed to. His limbs feel weighed down. His steps feel firmer and heavier than they’ve ever felt before. And the air that his arms push through feels as though it actually pushes back. He wonders if he ever noticed this when he was alive. He wonders, if he could have remembered anything when he died, if he’d have noted, instead, how strange it was to be so weightless.

When he finishes his slow rotation, he beams over to Keith—who is watching him now with a pensive expression, arms crossed over his chest, cheeks subtly pink, and the corners of his mouth turned up in something perhaps even resembling a smile.

“How do I look?” Lance asks, beaming so wide now that the corners of his canines are bared to the frigid cold air, posing as he thinks that a model might for a photoshoot, slack and boneless and effortless as those men had situated themselves on the Abercrombie posters.

Keith watches him for a few beats too long. His smile drops and his cheeks darken. Quickly, he jerks his head away, clearing his throat and checking his watch for what must be the hundredth time just this morning.

“You—you look like an idiot dancing around in his PJs on the sidewalk,” He croaks, turning his back to Lance and taking a few stiff steps past the condemned apartment complex, “We’re gonna be late. Come on. We need to find someone to talk to.”

Lance allows himself to laugh, to feel as though maybe Keith’s embarrassed by his blithe display here and not judging him more than he already has been today. He feels suddenly invigorated, barely even embarrassed at all that he’s spending his first outing in human skin again dressed like a maniac. He decides that the worst part of his week is already behind him, and it’s only smooth sailing from here.

He’s wrong, of course, but it’s a nice thought at the moment. And in this moment, he feels so free and so full of possibilities that he barely even remembers that he’s dead at all.

Until, abruptly, only moments later, the fragile illusion of safety that he’s crafted around himself comes crumbling down, hard.

“Lance? Lance McClain? Is that you?”

Lance, at first, barely registers the words. He notices first that Keith stops suddenly, that his shoulders stiffen and square. He doesn’t turn around to search for the source of that voice. And he doesn’t give Lance even the slightest indication as to what he should do now. Lance can only see the side of his face and the back of his wild mop of hair from where he’s standing, just slightly behind him, just slightly off to the side. But Keith’s skin looks suddenly drained of color. His eyes are wide and focused hard on something just far enough into a distant crowd of people that Lance can’t decipher what it is.

But the voice persists. And finally, slowly, Keith turns around.

“Lance—I—Is that you—”

“Sorry, are you talking to us? Neither of us are named Lance, but do you think you can give us some directions? We’re lost.”

Lance feels as though his heart is shoved up in his throat. He trembles suddenly, reminded that it’s cold and he’s only half dressed. He clutches his fist, wrapped around his ticking pocket watch, close to his chest. He shakes in his fluffy, ridiculous pajama pants, his knees nearly knocking together at the force with which he trembles.

And he turns too, to face the person who’s calling out for him. He feels suddenly as though he’s facing his second death. As though now, after all of the time that he’s spent building a life for himself after his death, something new and unexpected and horrible has introduced itself just to knock all of that down.

The man who Keith speaks to now is not someone who he recognizes, and he almost laughs at how ludicrous of an idea it is that he might recognize anyone living on Earth anymore. He’s a little bit taller than Keith, maybe taller even than Lance himself, but Lance can’t tell from the distance that’s still sitting between them. He glances up at Lance from Keith’s face, every so often. He seems to be studying Lance for any indication that he’s recognized, or that either of them are lying. But Lance knows that he won’t find anything in his expression that’s telling. He knows that, even though it’s very likely that he must have known this man at some point in his life, there’s absolutely no way that he would remember him now.

He feels not even a twinge of yearning or need in his chest. He doesn’t feel as though the memories of this man are just on the tip of his tongue when their eyes meet. He feels nothing now, but desperate. But longing to remember even that old, rusty stove and the popping grease under the bacon and eggs. Even the blurry smile of that woman or the sweet, soft words that she’d whispered. This man wasn’t part of that scene. His face is clear and vivid and his words are loud and crisp and real.

He’s telling Keith where the old apartment complex moved to and as Keith thanks him and pulls away, he takes a tentative step forward, his eyes needy and curious and reaching out for Lance.

Who feels, right now, as though he’s choking on every emotion that he’s ever felt, and every single word that he’s wanted to, but never said.

“Man, it’s almost spooky,” the guy says, “You look just like this kid who I went to high school with, but… I heard that he died. I’m sorry—”

Forced, solemn laughter. There isn’t humor in it, just like there isn’t any oxygen left in Lance’s deflated lungs.

“His name was Lance McClain—good guy, sorry. I know… this probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but… he was a great person. I heard that he died in a car wreck, or—or from getting hit by a car trying to save his niece. I remember that they called him a hero in the papers, had a big charity drive to save up money for his funeral. It’s weird… I haven’t seen him in a long time, but… you look exactly like him.”

Keith’s hand is warm and firm when it grabs his arm. The force of him is unwavering when he begins to drag Lance away. Lance feels suddenly timid and weightless and paper thin. He feels waifish as Keith announces flatly that they really need to get going. They’re running late, but he’s sorry to hear about the death of that guy’s old friend.

Lance stumbles, walking backward for a fraction of a moment. He can’t take his eyes off of that man, watching him as though he might disappear from existence any moment now. As though he isn’t real, just a hallucination. As though any second now, Lance might start laughing and tell him that it was all a joke. He faked his death, he ran away from home. He left behind everyone who he loved and who ever loved him, just to parade around in this city in his pajamas, pretending to be a stranger to everyone who’s ever met him.

He thinks that it’s a cruel joke. And he isn’t sure if he means the idea of a reality where that might be the truth or the actual reality that he’s living in now.

He’s clamming and jerky, put out like a candle wick between two wetted fingers when Keith finally manages to haul him around. They walk in silence for a long stretch of time, around street corners and over crosswalks. Lance doesn’t even jerk or flinch or feel the warmth of Keith’s skin with the appreciation that he might have previously when he reaches over and hits the “S” button on the watch still grasped tightly in Lance’s palm to his chest.

He barely experiences the dizziness of disappearing again. He wonders what that man might tell his old classmates when he sees them. He wonders if they’ll think that he’s crazy. He wonders if, from now on, that man will feel as though he’s seeing Lance’s face in every crowded room. The same way that Lance passes people on these sidewalks frequently, invisible, but feeling as though, at any moment, he might be phasing through a woman who might have been his sister, or his aunt, or a man who could be the father who still, to this day, mourns him.

Lance chokes a laugh, just as Keith begins slowing down, just as the silhouette of a building begins to grow nearer in the distance, and Lance suspects that it’s their desired destination.

“So.” His laughter is short and clipped and humorless, just as that man’s had been. It feels like barbed wire tangled in his throat. “I guess today’s gonna be a hot chocolate day back at the office, isn’t it?”

Keith doesn’t stop walking, but he turns to Lance, barely facing him, and sends him a perplexed, and maybe even somewhat offended look. His brows bow in the middle, the corners of his mouth pulled back in what might be a grimace, but could very well be any other of the three emotions that Lance has seen him express—Lance isn’t so sure. He feels numb to everything now, and he doesn’t know why he feels this way. He got what he wanted, he knows. This is exactly what he’s been vying after this whole time.

But he doesn’t feel better, knowing that people remember him. Knowing how he died.

He just feels cold, and empty, and alone. He just feels a need for something distant and impossible that he still doesn’t entirely understand.

“What?” Keith asks him then, belated and perhaps somewhat embarrassed, Lance doesn’t have the strength to even hope for it anymore. “What are you talking about?”

Lance draws in a deep breath, slowing, then stalling, before Keith stops walking as well. He tips his head back, feeling the now muted rush of frigid wind on his cheeks, the cold bite of it in the teardrops that cling tightly to his eyelashes. He looks to the gray scale sky, the blurry clouds, the black buildings shadowed and high and unreachable. He wishes that there were birds flying today. He wishes that he could at least see a free thing floating in the open air, that he could find something to covet—something untethered, and unknowing, and unafraid of the death that now binds him to this unforgiving eternity.

His words are cracked and jagged. Keith, to his credit, makes no audible note of how close he sounds like he is to crying.

“When I have a bad day, you always give me hot chocolate. I… I don’t know why you do that, but… it always makes me feel better.” His eyes fall down to Keith, who watches him now, blank and quiet, unmoving, surely not knowing what to do. “Why do you do that, by the way? You—you know everyone around the office says that you like me more than you like anyone else, right? They say that you give me special treatment. Why is that, Keith? Why do you care so much about me, of all people?”

Keith’s eyes widen. His teeth bare slightly, before burying themselves hard into his bottom lip. He drags in a deep breath that expands his chest, pushes back his shoulders. He looks as though he’s been put on the spot, as though he’d like nothing more than to dart his eyes away, or run, or let go of Lance’s arm. As though, right now, he’s caught between two choices: ignore this, let Lance suffer, or comfort him and possibly expose the private motives that have befuddled Lance for months now.

Lance isn’t even sure why it’s such a hard decision to make. Everything that he thinks that he knows about Keith is currently telling him that realistically, Keith should just shove him away. He should make some half-baked excuse and force Lance to bottle up his childish, stupid feelings until he can vent them alone in his dorm room, and not on company time.

And Lance knows, considering everything that he thinks that he knows about Keith, that he definitely shouldn’t be softening now, around the eyes, in his tense jaw, in the shoulders and the sharp arch of his brows. He shouldn’t be weakening his tight grip on Lance’s arm or exhaling shallowly, clearing his throat, and darting those pretty eyes to the apartment complex before seemingly settling on his decision.

His cheeks shouldn’t be so pink either. He shouldn’t be embarrassed if, in reality, Lance has been misunderstanding his motives and his reasoning all along.

But, contrary to anything that Lance might have believed to be true before this moment, all of those things happen. And they happen so quickly that he can barely comprehend any of it before Keith is speaking to him in a voice so soft, so careful and sweet and gentle that it barely even sounds like Keith is actually speaking to him.

“I told you that you’d regret knowing,” Keith tells him then, but his voice isn’t cocky. He doesn’t seem proud of himself in the least for being proven right. He only hangs his head lower, his grip slipping from Lance’s arm downward, until it’s dropped limply and uselessly between them.

Keith looks deflated now, totally worn out. He looks as though whatever he’s going to say next, once he finds the right words, might be the last thing that he’d ever want to tell Lance to his face.

And after a quiet, painful moment, after the ugly, thrumming emotions currently boiling in Lance’s chest feel as though they’ve bubbled up so high that he might explode, Keith speaks.

He understands now, as his eyes widen. As his jaw slackens. As Keith’s pretty face warps into an expression so lost and hapless while Lance, drowning here, is totally incapable of saving him.

Lance suddenly understands why Keith had told him that he wouldn’t want to know the answers to any of his questions.

And Keith, the slick bastard, he was nothing but right about all of it.

“I know—about you, I mean. I know everything that you were wondering. I know about… your family, and how you died… and what happened to you after.” Keith tells him, gaze glassy but unwavering, “Lance, I was the reaper who collected you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to the wonderful [epiproctan](http://epiproctan.tumblr.com) for posting this chapter for me!  
> And by the way, these chapter lengths are the most inconsistent thing in the universe… I know, I know. I’m so sorry.   
> **note from epi:** isn't this story amazing?? if you think so (which i know you do) please tell moth in the comments!!


	8. Plinth

It seemed to Keith, when he’d first clocked in on a normal morning just a few months ago, as though it would be nothing but a standard, uneventful day.

It hadn’t been particularly busy or slow lately. The cases that he’d been assigned to hadn’t been needlessly complicated and Keith hadn’t found himself drowning in paperwork or field assignments more so than he usually did. His coworkers, during the clipped conversations that he could catch from the break room and the water cooler as he passed, whispered and hissed about an influx of deaths during this time of the year, but for the life of him, Keith couldn’t understand why everyone else was having such a hard time.

He’d expressed this sentiment to Shiro earlier in the morning, as he’d met him at his desk to collect his daily paperwork just as he did at the beginning of every other ordinary shift, and Shiro had laughed at him. He’d done so in the same good-natured and soft way that he always laughed when Keith made such snippy comments about their peers. He’d handed Keith a thick stack of papers, his dark eyes catching the glimmer of the lights overhead.

“Not everyone has your natural talent, Keith,” Shiro had told him, “Imagine how lost you’d feel if you were given Coran’s job, or a career making the tickers. You’d complain too, wouldn’t you?”

That hadn’t made a whole lot of sense to Keith either, but he’d chosen to keep all of the potential arguments blossoming inside of him to himself. He’d met their white-hooded God only fleetingly throughout his time as a reaper, and he knew that Shiro had a more personal relationship with her. He knew that accusing her of choosing their ranks poorly and carelessly would only result in Shiro defending her—telling him, for what could have been the thousandth time,  _ “Allura doesn’t make mistakes, Keith, but her job is harder than it looks.” _

Which was also stupid, because her job already seemed impossible to Keith. It would be difficult to imagine that it was even harder than he felt like it would be, or to express the difficulty of such a career while also claiming that she never did anything wrong. To Keith, it had to be one or the other. It had to be a hard job that she struggled with or she had to never do anything wrong, but he was getting off-track, he knew. He was allowing his thoughts to wander while he should have been focusing on the papers on his desk instead.

He’d left Shiro’s office and made himself comfortable in his own nearly an hour ago. He knew that putting off the inevitable trip to the living world was only going to make things harder when he actually got to work. He knew that the timer only started counting down when he stepped through the closet and that he could simply come back and reset the clock if he started running behind, but that required more paperwork to be done after, and it didn’t look good on the permanent record that Coran claimed that Allura kept on all of them. He needed to get a few of his cases out of the way early on, needed to get caught up with his work so he could perhaps help his unappreciative coworkers with their own workloads when they dithered for too long with their gossip and frequent coffee breaks and subsequently fell behind. Shiro always seemed just a little stressed and overworked, even during his days off, and for him, at least, Keith worked harder to shoulder some of the burdens, even if the people who he directly assisted didn’t know or care that he was doing it.

That was another mystery that he didn’t quite care enough to get to the bottom of, whether or not his peers actually understood that he was only working so hard to benefit them, and to shoulder some of the extra weight if only so they wouldn’t complain as much. If only so Shiro wouldn’t be worked to his second death just trying to hold everything together.

Shiro, to his credit, thanked him frequently. And Keith usually convinced himself that he only did it for Shiro’s approval anyway. That Shiro’s praise was good enough, and he didn’t care about what anyone else thought of him. He didn’t like thinking that it might hurt his feelings that none of his coworkers seemed to like him. He didn’t like imagining that the tightness in his chest when they stopped talking upon his arrival was jealousy, or a bruised ego, or a childish need to fit in even among people who so clearly didn’t appreciate his company. That somewhere, deep down, he wanted nothing more than to have a friend, even just one, who wasn’t a mentor like Shiro, or a boss like Coran, or someone else who’d taken him under their wing if only because they understood how valuable his work was to the company.

He knew very little about the life that he led before he came there. He knew that his name was Keith. He knew that he had a prominent, pre-existing facial scar that outdated his demise. He knew that he must have died violently and that he was angry frequently. That a rage boiled inside of him no matter how desperately he struggled to convince himself that he didn’t even know what he was so worked up about.

It was hard getting close to people when he couldn’t stop himself from being upset. It was difficult to even begin considering explaining how he felt to anyone but Shiro.

He didn’t think that they’d understand that he only worked so hard because work, because throwing himself into these jobs and working until he was exhausted—earning Shiro’s approval and feeling as though he’d done a good job—these were the only things that could abate the white-hot flame of that anger.

And the sadness, too, that he liked thinking of even less than the rage.

He’d shaken his head then, taking a deep breath and organizing his finished paperwork into a neat stack. He’d deliver it later on, or maybe Shiro would stop in while he was on the other side of the portal and take it for him. Shiro helped out when he could, Keith knew, but he couldn’t do a lot as a reaper who’d long since been retired from fieldwork. He imagined that the promotion to supervisor wasn’t quite as glamorous as Shiro seemed to pretend, that maybe, sometimes, his fingers itched to open one of those doors and venture to the other world. That he yearned for the sights and smells and sounds of a universe that his mind had forgotten, but his soul felt drawn to like a moth to a flame.

Keith was familiar with that feeling. It had been two hundred years at that point since the soul of a deceased person had elected to stay behind and join them. Everyone within their ranks had been away from the living world for too long. They felt out of touch. They felt distanced and strange in the eyes of the people who they reaped.

But it was rare, Keith knew, that someone would be willing to postpone their happy afterlife to stay behind. It was considered an honor—maybe the reason why someone like Shiro was promoted in the first place—to successfully convince a human soul to linger behind. Shiro had convinced three people during his time in the field, and Keith had never had the nerve to address the fact that, surely, he was one of them. But he was familiar with the fanfare. He knew that they were in desperate need of help.

He just wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to people, or what he was supposed to do. He tried to be patient, to be sweet. He tried to be considerate of their plights and to talk to them in a way that he imagined might have convinced a younger, half-alive version of himself to stay behind and toil with this thankless work. But he knew that they all forgot about him the moment that they passed through the station towards that single train car. He felt as though everything that he could have said to them, proverbially, might have gone in one ear and slipped out the other.

Shiro, when he asked, had described it as more of a feeling. More of a way that a reaper treats people to make them feel more comfortable about not passing on. He’d said that he’d had a feeling about everyone who stayed behind, that they each had a way of impressing him, standing out to him, and leaving an impression on him that he’d found hard to shake off until he’d returned to work and Coran had introduced a new, blank-slate version of that same person to work under his supervision.

He’d clapped a warm and comforting hand on Keith’s shoulder then, his eyes soft and his smile wide and big and proud. Keith had felt pinned and embarrassed at that moment. He’d felt as though he was anything but the prodigy that Shiro so often made him out to be.

Shiro wasn’t very good at keeping secrets, but it wasn’t any surprise that Keith, in life, had willingly following behind him.

But, again, he was getting sidetracked. There were three souls on his roster that he needed to reap. They were far enough apart that he knew that he could take his time with them. He didn’t need to rush, but he also knew that it would be important to keep his wits about him. Already, in the time that he’d been charged with this job, he’d won the bad luck lottery with Coran. He’d been assigned fifteen cases at the wrong address, twelve at the wrong time, and a single particularly horrible outlier with the wrong name and cause of death.

That day had been especially rough. That had been the day when he’d charged back into the office, intent on wrapping his fingers around Coran’s smarmy little throat and strangling the second life out of him. He’d been an hour late reaping the rest of the souls on his list. He’d waited around like an idiot for a death that wasn’t scheduled to happen in that spot, to that person, for what he’d later learned was another two hundred years.

He’d suspected, at first, that he was being hazed. A few hundred years late, sure, but he was determined that Coran had it out for him. He hadn’t considered until Shiro started prying him off of Coran’s squirming, desperately wailing body and consoled him in a quick, hushed voice, that maybe Coran really was just that bad at his job. Maybe there was less math and more luck involved in being the keeper of the tickers than Keith had ever considered giving him credit for.

Coran was a kind person, and he was clever and quick-witted, and fatherly even when Keith had no memories of a father figure to compare him to. Coran never alluded to having any ill feelings towards him, and once Keith calmed down, he’d found himself in a sensible enough head space to really consider that perhaps, it really was just a mistake. Like Allura, he’d thought, maybe that job was a lot harder than it seemed. But unlike Allura, Coran was definitely known to make a lot of mistakes.

He dreaded most jobs, if only because he never knew when he’d be given the wrong information, but the first name on his roster seemed ironclad. The case seemed open and shut enough that he had no doubt that he’d be able to finish it without incident.

Lance McClain, 23 years old. Killed in an automobile accident while attempting to save his niece. She’d darted out into the street when her ball bounced from the yard and rolled into the center of it. A driver had been speeding through their neighborhood, not given enough time to slow down or veer in another direction when she’d jumped out from behind a parked car.

And Mr. McClain had heroically thrown himself between her and the car, shoving her out of the way just in the nick of time.

Keith checked the file once more, and a few after it. It didn’t seem that his niece was scheduled to move on. He couldn’t help but feel relieved, knowing that they wouldn’t be harvesting the soul of another child that day. That Lance McClain had died but succeeded. That perhaps he could tell him that he was a hero and that people would remember him fondly as such for years after his death, in order to convince him to move on to the other side.

It wasn’t a particularly stressful or exciting roster of souls to move on to the afterlife that day. It wasn’t a particularly intimidating or terrifying list of people—no powerful businessmen, no children taken far before their time, no babies, and no unusually violent deaths. Shiro, a long time ago, had divulged the information to him that his death had, in fact, been a gruesome one. He’d had the inkling of a suspicion that Shiro had been the reaper to harvest him just before that—given Shiro’s eventual, seemingly unprompted promotion to supervisor some time later, given that he’d been paired to work under Shiro without much question or speculation, as though the age-old concept of taking care of one's own was the backbone that held this entire institution together.

So he’d wondered that day, as he’d passed through the closet portal to the living world, if he’d ever find a human who was willing to stay behind after he’d harvested them as well. And he wasn’t sure how he’d act if that happened. If he’d feel honored, or closely connected to them as Shiro claimed to have felt with him. If they’d impress him, if he’d find that it was easier to grow closer to them than the coworkers who he spent his days with, who never seemed particularly interested in connecting to him even when he used to try.

Shiro said that they were jealous because he was good at this job. Keith hadn’t understood that at the time, but part of him, deep down, yearned to see a fresh face walking down the halls, to meet a new person who was free of the bias that compelled his peers to ostracize him. He wasn’t exactly crying over the fact that he didn’t have any friends aside from Shiro, and maybe Coran, if he was really desperate enough to count him. It wasn’t that he wanted to be just another tired face and another series of complaints and gossip among the regular groups that he’d witnessed slacking off in the breakroom when he stopped in to grab some lunch from the vending machines. He didn’t care too much about fitting in. He wasn’t insecure or depressed or heartbroken over his lack of tact or charm or social prowess.

But sometimes it was boring, and maybe even a little lonely, always being by himself. Sometimes he wanted nothing more than to relax on his days off with someone who didn’t expect for him to be funny or entertaining and might have just enjoyed his company because he was himself.

He didn’t know if he’d had any friends in life. It felt far more familiar to be alone than to force himself to put on a mask of someone far more graceful with relationships in order to hold people’s attention.

But he’d wondered idly, as he’d made his way to the crowded neighborhood where he was scheduled, any minute then, to collect Lance McClain, how a person like that might fare in the afterlife, after being so beloved by his family and his community. How he’d feel if he were to be in Keith’s shoes then: alone and overworked. Always banished to the furthest corner of any group because he was too quiet, too blunt, not fun or relatable or interesting enough to fit in with the other reapers.

It made him sound pathetic, he knew, and he also knew that someone like Lance McClain would probably make friends a lot easier. Someone who died throwing himself in front of a speeding car to save a little girl was surely exactly the kind of person who all of his coworkers would actually want to spend time with.

And surely, Lance was the type of person who would take one look at him and decide that he wasn’t worth his time.

He didn’t like caring so much about how someone who he’d never met before would think of him, and frankly, he wasn’t even sure why he was entertaining the thought of it in the first place. He’d never wondered what the deceased would think of him personally before. He’d never spared them much more than a fleeting, mournful thought. He’d never considered how they’d act if they’d met him when he was alive, as just people, just strangers, and not the wandering spirit and the reaper charged with caging them in.

But the idea still culminated in his brain, still sat, buzzing at the back of his thoughts. Even as he rounded the corner of the narrow street, even as he stepped over overgrown weeds and tall grass in neglected yards. He’d wondered if he would have lived in a neighborhood similar to this one, if the two of them would have played together in the street as kids. Lance McClain came from a humble life. He lived in a small house with worn paint in the center of a lower middle-class neighborhood.

Keith had watched the wealth in this city rise and fall—from the roaring boom of the 1920s to the Great Depression. He’d watched the world around him change, watched skyscrapers built up to the heavens from the ground. Technology hadn’t made a lot of sense to him, but Shiro had assured him that he’d get used to those changes in time. He’d learn to ignore them, perhaps he’d even learn how people used them. He’d learn to work around them and to use this new blossoming world to his advantage when convincing humans to pass over to the other side.

In a financial recession, it wasn’t uncommon to find himself venturing into deteriorating neighborhoods exactly like that one, and Lance McClain’s was neither particularly noteworthy for its niceness or dangerousness. The cars cramped along the street weren’t too fancy or too run down. The lawns weren’t too well kept or too neglected. Keith felt unimpressed by the whole thing. He’d expected some level of drama or spectacular presentation. He’d expected to find some clue there that would allow him to stop wondering about a person like Lance.

He’d thought that maybe a hero would come from humble beginnings, just like they often did on TV. He’d caught the clipped pieces of superhero movies and dramas sometimes when he was working. He’d found himself entranced, at first, by the people moving around in such a strange and mysterious box.

But when he’d gotten used to it, to television and cell phones and the little computers that people often carried around in their bags, he’d focused instead on what they were watching. What sorts of stories compelled the modern age.

And heroes coming from humble beginnings were popular. But Lance McClain’s beginnings seemed neither humble enough or substantial enough to really wow him in the way that he felt that they should.

It was vastly uncommon to reap the soul of a person who died heroically. Shiro had told him, long ago, that he’d only harvested the souls of three people, total, who had died saving someone else’s life.

And maybe Keith had built this opportunity up in his head. Maybe he’d thought that the whole thing would be a lot more exciting or illuminating than it really would be in reality. Accidents, he’d thought, were at least stressful enough that they held his attention. Quiet, peaceful deaths were at least rewarding in the way that the deceased were always so willing to follow him.

But a hero, he wasn’t so sure about.

He’d pushed aside any intimidation that he might have felt in that moment. He’d convinced himself that he wasn’t nervous, and he definitely hadn’t stopped to check his reflection in the mirror of a car parked at the side of the road, as though he could actually see his hair or any mess left on his clothes from his quick breakfast in his current, invisible state. He’d felt nerves vibrating through him, wondered fearfully if James or Ryan or any of the other reapers back in the other world might have been better suited to bringing this particular hero to the other side.

He knew even back then that he was inflating the situation, but never, since he’d died, had he ever met a dying person who deserved respect as much as someone who gave their life just to save someone else’s.

Shiro had laughed earlier when he’d voiced his concerns, his doubts. When he’d stopped into the office and Shiro had handed over Keith’s daily jobs and Keith had raised a brow, standing just a little bit straighter, squaring his shoulders and stiffening his muscles in response to the nerves that had scattered like live electricity over the entire surface of his skin. When he’d inspected the cause of death on Lance’s McClain’s sheet with growing trepidation, and he’d asked Shiro if he was sure then. If he understood that he was giving Keith, of all people, such an important case when surely someone else could have done a better job.

_ “I’m not very good with people, Shiro,” _ he’d said,  _ “I can barely get the easy ones to come with me.” _

Shiro’s smile had been soft and reassuring, and infuriatingly knowing. He’d scooted back in his chair, reaching forward and taking a short sip from his coffee mug. He’d been thumbing through another small stack of files that he must have been planning to hand off to another reaper later on. He hadn’t seemed entirely focused on Keith then, but that seemed purposeful as well. As though treating this casually would alleviate some of Keith’s anxiety, if only he could fool him into believing that the McClain case wasn’t nearly as important as it had felt just then.

_ “You guys have a lot more in common than you realize,” _ Shiro had said then, and Keith had known, just from the mysterious little pull of his lips, the twinkling of his eyes, that he was alluding to something in Keith’s past, something that made him special enough to stay behind too, and that Shiro probably wouldn’t explain further no matter how hard he pressed.

But as he walked further down the street, as he neared the growing crowd of people in front of what the thoughts fed to him from the information in his ticker told him was Lance’s house and the place where he would very soon die, Keith found that he didn’t feel as though he had anything in common with a person like Lance McClain at all.

Shiro could be wrong, he knew. He’d been wrong when he’d told Keith that he had a bright future ahead of him. He’d been wrong when he’d told him that the people around them would eventually get friendlier, that they’d learn to like him in time.

He’d been wrong when he’d told Keith that the aching loneliness and the urge to reach for something that he didn’t even remember anymore would get easier to shoulder the longer that he lived with it. That it wouldn’t grow larger and worse, and harder to understand. That he wouldn’t feel lonelier or more aimless as many, many years passed him by.

Shiro had been wrong when he’d told Keith that things would end up better than they were. His heart had been in the right place, Keith understood that. And maybe, secretly, he’d still been trying to convince himself.

But more than anything, as Keith grew nearer and nearer to the crowd surrounding Lance McClain’s slowly dying body, Keith had wanted him to be right, just once. Just then, in that moment, about someone surely valiant and brave and heartfelt like Lance. He didn’t understand why it mattered if he was somehow similar to a hero who gave his life for a loved one. He didn’t expect for Lance to forego the mysterious afterlife in favor of staying behind as a reaper. He didn’t think that he’d ever see Lance again after that day, but…

He’d thought—stupidly, desperately—that if he could meet even one person in the universe who thought like him and who liked him as he was, maybe he could stop feeling so out of place and so weird and wrong and so terribly hard to love.

Maybe, then, he could accept that he was simply dealt a bad hand in life and death, and then, maybe, he could learn to make the best of what he had.

He didn’t enjoy putting so much at stake when he didn’t even know what kind of person Lance McClain was. He didn’t like thinking that if Lance didn’t like him, that might affirm some silly insecurity that he had about himself. That if this situation went south, perhaps he’d leave it feeling like a lesser person. That a stranger, and a freshly dead one at that, could leave him feeling worse about himself without his consent.

But Lance’s iridescent spirit hovered just a little ways behind the crowd. It was a familiar sight, to see the deceased watching their own corpse and struggling to piece together everything that had happened to lead them there. But Lance’s focus wasn’t on the paramedics doing CPR. He wasn’t looking at the crumpled remains of his body just freshly gone cold and still. He wasn’t trying to catch the attention of his loved ones and tell them that he was okay.

Lance, having just died in the quick confusion of a violent and terrible accident, didn’t seem worried about his own safety in the least.

His eyes were stuck on the men lifting a little girl onto a stretcher. There was blood there too—Keith realized that she’d scraped the skin off of her knees when she’d been shoved away. She might have broken a bone. She might have been stalled in shock, terrified and trapped in the horrible realization that her beloved uncle had just been pulverized on the pavement right before her eyes.

Keith felt an ache in his chest at the thought of it, and he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t know why the idea of this particular child blaming herself for the death of an adult suddenly struck a chord in him. He didn’t have the memories required to connect this picture with anything that he could relate to.

But he didn’t have time to consider it. Lance was suddenly on the move. He was staggering forward, still unsteady in his newer, lighter apparition of a physical form. He was making his way around the crying, screaming people around him. He was moving along as though he was determined to get into the back of that ambulance just before the workers closed the doors.

Keith found that, for a moment, he almost let him go. But his remaining human instincts were quickly drowned out by the restraints of his job. He knew that he’d be in deep trouble if he allowed Lance to become a ghost just because of some romantic idea that guiding his niece through her ER visit might be a better story to tell.

He charged forward, calling out more with sounds than words. He wasn’t sure exactly what he said to make Lance stop, if perhaps his foreign voice and the realization that someone could see him might have been what stopped Lance in his tracks. But Keith was able to sprint forward to reach him without much effort. His eyes were wide and his heart pounded wildly in his chest. Lance turned in seemingly slow motion and his eyes caught in the setting sun. Small irises, but sparkling blue. He was tearing up. His skin was golden hued and a deep, warm tan even in death, in the late afternoon. His short, dark hair curled around his face with sweat. Lance McClain had no way of knowing that he was dead and Keith was there to bring him to the other side.

He had no way of understanding the inexplicable universe that existed just beyond the realm where Keith had spent the last few hundred years.

But he turned to Keith and he looked at him, right into his eyes. He looked at Keith, and Keith felt in that moment wholly understood. He felt like nothing but a person. He felt small, and scared, and bared vulnerable under the scrutiny of Lance’s wide and knowing gaze.

Keith thought, in that moment, that Lance McClain was the most beautiful person that he’d ever seen in his life.

A hero, a person who looked at him not like he was terrifying, like he was strange, like he was someone to envy or hate or push away—

But like a human who could see him. Someone who could help him. Someone who, shortly after, Lance caught his breath and spoke to as though he could trust Keith with anything even though he didn’t know him.

“I need to make sure that she’s okay,” Lance told him, “My niece—she was in an accident. I think I’m dead, but—but I need to make sure that she’s okay.”

It had taken a minute for Keith to remember how to talk. Through the proverbial golden halo of sunlight encircling Lance’s beautiful head, through the sweet honey of Lance’s soft and breathy words.

Through the warmth that Keith felt fanning out over his skin, the rapid pounding of his heart, the lightness swimming in his murky thoughts, Keith suddenly remembered that his job directly contradicted everything that Lance needed to do right then.

He’d cleared his throat, crossing his arms over his chest if only so Lance couldn’t see how much they shook.

“You can’t,” he’d said then, barely loud enough to be heard over the sound of a woman loudly crying, “I—I’m supposed to take you to the other side, I’m—I’m sorry, but she’s not going to die today. I promise.”

Lance’s expression had immediately dropped from solemn and worried to absolutely horrified. Keith had found it very hard to keep the shock and sadness from his own face, to stop himself from apologizing even more and explaining to Lance that he’d love nothing more than to let him do everything that he wanted, if only it would make him smile.

But Keith knew that it was inappropriate to have those sorts of feelings for any person. For any soul that they reaped, they needed to be objective. They couldn’t allow their emotions to impact their decisions.

And he knew that allowing Lance to run away then would only result in Lance lingering in the living world for the rest of his eternity. He knew that giving Lance even the smallest act of compassion would disadvantage him in the end.

Keith floundered in the realization that he’d piled so many unfair expectations on Lance’s shoulders, that he’d invested so much of his self-esteem in being liked by one person, only to ruin everything because he’d forgotten what his job entailed.

He accepted it just as quickly as the thought flourished in his head. Lance was inching away, as though he thought that he could chase after the then-receding back of the ambulance. He’d looked from Keith to the van, crossed his own arms over his chest, and tapped his foot quickly against the pavement.

“I’m not going,” he’d said then, “I’m not leaving until I make sure that she’s okay.”

Annoyance quickly replaced the mourning in Keith’s heart. He straightened his posture, standing tall enough that perhaps he could seem confident enough to make up for the inches that he lacked on Lance.

“You  _ are _ going,” he’d said then, “And you’re going right now. I have a job to do, and I’m not going to let you become a ghost just because you wanna take a field trip to the hospital.”

Lance had squared his shoulders, dropping his arms straight out to his sides and balling his fists. He’d stomped the ground once, hard, like a child throwing a tantrum, and for a moment, Keith had almost worried that he was going to punch him. But Lance had looked then to the ambulance pulling just out of the neighborhood and had listened to the scream of it fading into the noise of the crying, mourning people just down the road. He’d spared a sole look at what Keith imagined must have been his mother and his aunts, holding each other and shuddering in frantic confusion as police took their statements, and the statement of the shell-shocked driver some ways away.

He’d only spared Keith one last sentence before he’d taken off. A short phrase that sent a tremor crawling up Keith’s spine.

Lance was the most beautiful person who he’d ever seen before, but there was more than just his face. He’d died for his niece. He’d worried about her even as most people in his position would find themselves too possessed by their own uncertainty and heartbreak to think of anyone else.

And he said to Keith then, so calm and quiet and cool that Keith felt weak in the knees, “I don’t care what happens to me. I need to make sure that she’s okay.”

And just like that, he was gone.

He’d sprinted off in pursuit of the ambulance, ducking around the corner and off into the depths of a neighborhood that Keith wasn’t nearly familiar with.

It took Keith a moment to collect himself, to register what he’d heard and to calm the swift beating of his pulse. To ease away the heat that had risen in his cheeks. He felt like an idiot for developing such a quick, petty crush on someone, and a deceased person, of all people. As though any pursuit of such feelings in the small window of time that he was allowed to spend with Lance wouldn’t inevitably fail as soon as he actually convinced him to move on. As he began running behind Lance, he was determined that he would catch him, drag him back to the train station if he had to, and put this whole ridiculous thing to rest. He wasn’t going to keep entertaining any juvenile fantasies that Lance would like him or respect him, or that his job today would impact him more than adding an extra layer of inconvenience and annoyance to his already hefty roster of work.

He wasn’t going to pretend that this story would have a happy, romantic ending that would make him a better or stronger person. Lance was running because Keith had been too immature and unprofessional to say what needed to be said in order to convince him to stop chasing after his niece and move on.

He’d allowed himself to dwell in his idealized version of the afterlife for far too long, to imagine that any person could be special enough to care so much about him unprompted. To think that Lance was anything but a person who wasn’t perfect, who made mistakes, who didn’t know what was good for him unless Keith explained the rules of their universe well enough.

He knew that Lance was a hero, that he cared about his family, that he didn’t fear the endless invisible afterlife that becoming a ghost would grant him, if only he could help someone else.

He knew that Lance needed to follow him soon. He knew that bad things would happen if he didn’t.

But as he chased behind Lance and called out to him in words that weren’t practiced or gentle enough to actually convince him to stop, Keith learned a few things about him that definitely weren’t in his file:

One, he was a very fast runner. He looked natural and practiced in the way that he leaped over the curbs and weaved through the parked cars. He didn’t run fast enough to lose steam too quickly, but he was swift enough that Keith had trouble catching up to him, even as he finally caught sight of him, even as he made a winded, clumsy attempt at closing in.

Two, he was determined. Keith had dealt with many spirits who tried to run away. He’d learned in his time working in this particular career track that many of them would give up quickly, that they needed just a little bit of coaxing and perhaps a reality check. Many people just needed a moment for the concept of “come now, or you’ll be a ghost for eternity” to sink in. But Lance had passed the usual timespan, and he still kept pressing on, as though he had any way of knowing which way the ambulance was headed once it was out of sight. As though he’d keep wandering even long after Keith gave up on him, and he wouldn’t stop searching until he found the right place.

And three, Lance was soft and warm and somehow comfortable to put his hands on, even as Keith charged towards him, grabbing him roughly and forcing both of them down to the ground.

Keith ignored the third thing, ignored the way that his whole body felt as though it had caught flame, how his heart continued to patter helplessly within his chest, as though he might have a heart attack and die his second death.

He shoved Lance down, trapping his wrists behind his back and pinning his legs down with his knees.

He ignored the creeping feeling that this, in and of itself, was incredibly inappropriate. Not because of his use of force, in particular. Shiro had assured him time and time again that often the spirits would need to be forced to listen to reason when they ran away. Prior to then, to the moment when Keith grasped and pawed unceremoniously at Lance and pinned him down in perhaps the most suggestive pose that he’d ever pulled off in his afterlife, he hadn’t needed to wrestle too many people into submission.

And he definitely hadn’t had quite as many feelings about it as he did in that moment.

That was why it was inappropriate. Because he knew that Lance wouldn’t remember it. He knew that he’d be the only one kept awake deep into the night, thinking about how his body had folded behind Lance’s as though the two of them were matching pieces of the same puzzle. How a hot arousal had overtaken him, possessed him so fully that he’d only loosened his grip and eased off slightly in fear of Lance feeling exactly what was so inappropriate about this whole situation pressed firmly into the cleft of his ass.

Keith hadn’t been plagued with the need that kindled many office romances back in the other realm. He’d never had a passing fancy or a crush that culminated within him and spread, worse and harder to shake, until he finally gave in and admitted his feelings to the other person. He’d heard about that sort of thing often, of course. It wasn’t uncommon for the reapers around him to fill their lonely evenings and nights and long weekends making memories that the creator couldn’t steal away from them later on. It wasn’t frowned upon either, because even dead, they were still human.

Shiro had told him that having feelings wasn’t betraying the job. Sometimes, he’d assured, it might clear his head and make him better at work.

But Keith was always alone, and he’d been told that he was the best reaper that there was, and might have ever been.

So he didn’t understand the correlation, didn’t see the point in baring himself and being vulnerable to another person, or making it easier to get hurt.

Until that moment. Until Lance was bent and struggling underneath him. Until he was pressed on top of him, holding him down. Lance howled and jerked and bared his teeth like a trapped animal. Lance tried to throw him off like a short-circuiting mechanical bull. He tried to pry his wrists from Keith’s hands, tried to squeeze his legs from under Keith’s knees.

But breathless, sweaty, with pink-tipped ears that Keith could barely see over his shoulder, finally, after much struggling, Lance gave up.

His voice was wet when he spoke, when Keith felt him go slack in his grip and boneless, despondent against the gravel of the road.

“I—I just wanted to see her one last time… I—I just wanted to make sure that she was okay…”

Keith would live to regret his next questionable decision for the rest of his days. Or, at least, until he finished filling out the mountains of paperwork that Shiro had dumped on his desk in response to such a silly, reckless, spur-of-the-moment act of treason.

But Lance was pretty and he was sad. And he cared so much that Keith could almost feel his passion emanating out of him, could almost feel the emotions strung where their skin still touched, in the warmth and softness of Lance, who, admittedly, he wanted to spend as much time around as he possibly could before he passed on to the other side.

He wasn’t sure what had changed in him. He didn’t like that he was going soft, that he’d slipped then, that he’d broken the rules that he’d held in such high regard all that time, if only for the benefit of one stupid, handsome boy.

If only for the hero who made him feel human for the very first time that he could remember since he died.

And, as he sat in the hospital waiting room with Lance by his side, just thirty minutes later, he couldn’t for the life of him explain why Lance made him feel that way in the first place.

Lance wasn’t talking much as they sat, as he hadn’t talked much on the journey there, or when Keith had finally released his arms and eased off of his legs. He seemed to be very upset, seemed to be angry that Keith seemingly forced him into a corner before he gave him what he wanted. He didn’t understand that Keith could get in a lot of trouble for allowing this. He didn’t seem to connect the dots, that Keith would have allowed him a moment to say goodbye if he even had one to offer, but as it was, he was behind schedule on all of his remaining field work for the day. His watch was blinking desperately. People back in the other realm were wondering where he was.

Another hour passed before a nurse peeked her head out of the hospital room. Lance was staring absently at a group of crying people across from them in the waiting area. They were a few of the women that Keith recognized from the road—Lance’s family, mourning and terrified.

They didn’t know what Keith knew, that the young girl would be okay. They didn’t know that Lance was watching them so closely, that he was so near in that moment that he could push himself up from his seat, take just a few short steps, and reach out to touch them.

They didn’t know that things would be okay. Lance wasn’t gone forever and they’d forget him when they died. That from Keith’s point of view, it used to seem silly that people would waste so much time mourning when they should have been living instead. When, in the end, nothing that they did mattered once the brief moment of their feeble existence passed.

He wasn’t sure why that thought felt wrong then. Why he felt as though he’d very swiftly grown too big to be thinking such small thoughts. Why he could suddenly understand why Lance’s family was missing him so terribly, why he, himself, felt that he would miss Lance too once he was gone.

He was uncomfortable with that abrupt realization. And thankfully, a moment later, he didn’t have to think about it too much more.

Slowly, quietly, Lance spoke. It was shaky with an emotion so heavy that Keith felt pinned in place by it. He didn’t know how he’d reacted to his own demise. He didn’t know if he had anyone left behind that would miss him as Lance’s family would surely miss him.

It had been a long time since he’d considered it. He wasn’t sure why his mind decided to do so then.

“So, the afterlife,” Lance had started, eyes held firmly on a curly haired woman at the center of the crying group, “Is it nice? Will my grandpa and great-grandparents and like, my ancestors and stuff be waiting for me?”

Keith had felt the words that he wanted to say lodged high up in his throat. He didn’t have the heart to tell Lance that he might not remember anything. He didn’t know how to explain to him that he had no idea what might have slept beyond his tiny office world, where things were so stuffy, so limited, where there wasn’t even a tangible universe beyond the rolling gray fog outside of the windows. Where he didn’t know anyone, and no one liked him.

He didn’t know how to explain to Lance that heaven or Hell were both a mystery to him still, and all that he knew was a sadness and a loneliness that felt too familiar to be different from what he must have known in life.

Lance didn’t seem to require an immediate answer, and maybe he didn’t even know that he’d spoken. Maybe he just wanted to fill the awful silence, to take a short break from the crying and the beeping of distant machines. Keith took a moment to compose himself, to breathe in the itchy smell of cleaning products, the overbearing lights above that prickled a headache between his eyebrows.

From the open door of a hospital room just down the hall, he could hear music. And he watched Lance as he struggled to pick out the tune of it, the words.

_ “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places—” _

Lance was gorgeous and he was sad, and he was dead. There was no changing any of those things. He watched his family mourn his death without the ability to reach out and touch them, to comfort them, to tell them that everything would be okay.

Keith was emotionally stunted and pitifully drowning. He’d dreamed, like a stupid, naive child, of impressing the first hero that he’d ever reaped since he started working just a few hundred years ago. He didn’t know anything about himself but his first name, but the fact that his death mark was uglier and more violent than any of the others that he’d seen in the locker room when he first started working.

He knew that he didn’t get along with people. He knew that Shiro was only his friend because he regarded him as some kind of tough nut to crack, or a lost puppy, or the sad kid in the cafeteria who had no one to sit with at lunch.

He knew that he was good at his job because he worked harder than most people. He worked weekends because he didn’t have anyone to spend his time off with. He’d met the figure called Allura, their God, just a couple of times before. And she’d been proud of his progress, as she’d spoken in even fewer words.

He knew that there was a reason why he was sent out to collect Lance that day. He knew that, even if he couldn’t grasp the thought process behind it, Coran had decided that he was the best man for the job.

So he breathed in deeply. He pressed his tight fists against his knees, and he tipped his head back, further and further until the back of it met the wall just behind his seat.

_ “I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day—” _

He wasn’t very good with words, but for Lance, he was willing to try his best.

He still couldn’t figure out why it mattered so much to him to do so.

“I’ve never been to the afterlife—not the one that you’re referring to. I’m in something like the “in-between”, where the other reapers live. But there’s another universe that you can pass on to as well. Most people do. I’ve heard that it’s nice, I guess. It’s probably better than this, and… better than where I am.”

_ “I’ll find you in the morning sun and when the night is new—” _

Lance had looked at him again, and Keith couldn’t stop himself from looking back. It was a strange new addiction, being seen by Lance McClain, and feeling as though he was really understood. As though a person was looking not through him, not down or above him or at some distant, whimsical dream of the person who they thought that he was or that he should be, but _ at him _ . Into his eyes. At everything that he was, sitting, tired and sore, on an uncomfortable hard plastic hospital chair. As a lonely, confused boy who still hadn’t found his footing at a job that he’d worked at for too long.

As a person who wanted more than anything to be understood, and Lance, he found, seemed to perfectly understand him. Without words, without affirmation. He just felt it, thrumming warm and full in the hollow dead recesses of a body that he hated looking at. He felt in the steep empty cavern of his heart, that Lance was looking at him, and that he was seeing something in him that Keith himself could never hope to reach.

Potential, maybe, as Shiro had. Or something softer, something that made his smile seem brighter. Something that flushed pink in the apples of his cheeks. Something fond and gentle and reassuring, because Lance, then, seemed reassured even when Keith hadn’t said anything particularly insightful.

A smile curled up the edges of Lance’s lips, and it looked nice on him. He was prettier when he smiled, when happiness flooded his features in place of the sadness that Keith had grown so accustomed to in such a short period of time. Keith decided that he wouldn’t forget this moment, this man. Long after Lance had moved on to the other side, Keith knew that the brand of him would stay dark against his heart—a memory, and a dream, of a “could have been” that never was, of a relationship that he could have forged, if only their timelines had coincided. If only they both hadn’t died too soon.

And Lance had said then, smooth and confident with all of the flowery charm of a protagonist straight out of some trashy romance novel, “If all of the reapers in the “in between” are as fine as you are, maybe I’ll just have to get me one of those reaper jobs too. I gotta say, I only fought as hard as I did earlier because I didn’t want you to stop straddling me. Are you the babe around the office, or is hotness just part of the job description?”

Keith had been so mortified, so embarrassed, so completely, wholly shocked that he couldn’t find the voice required for a rebuttal.

He regretted his newfound crush immediately.

And he knew, after everything, that Lance McClain definitely, one-hundred percent was not worth all of the paperwork and trouble that would meet him back at the office once he finally reaped his soul.

 

* * *

 

Long after the nurse finally announced to Lance’s family that his niece would be okay, after Lance lingered just at the edge of their tearful group and said quiet goodbyes that Keith made a point of pretending that he couldn’t hear, they found themselves standing just before the sliding doors at the entrance of the hospital. And Keith knew, in that moment, that from then on, Lance wouldn’t remember him ever again.

Keith didn’t entirely understand the magic behind it, but he knew that once he took Lance’s arm and led him through the doors, they’d arrive at the train station. And he knew that Lance wouldn’t be responsive throughout any of it, akin to a wandering ghost instead, to a zombie, quiet and focused on the singular goal of passing on to the other side.

And maybe Keith, during that moment, would speak to him. Maybe he’d try his best to reassure him in all of the ways that he should have when Lance could actually be comforted by his words. Keith knew that he had a lot to talk to Lance about. He knew that he would leave that day feeling better, lighter, more invigorated and reassured that he wasn’t too strange or too out of place in his afterlife.

He would still be lonely, he knew that. But maybe, eventually, he’d learn to fit in. He’d find something in common with his peers and he’d connect to them.

Because he’d know that someone like Lance could like him. For the first time, he understood what Shiro had told him before—some people meant more. Some people made an impact.

And in all of Keith’s time reaping souls, he’d never met someone who he wished to see more of, after all was said and done, than Lance McClain.

As he reached out to grasp Lance’s arm, Lance stopped him. He placed a gentle hand on top of Keith’s, turning to him with a soft, sad smile. Keith’s pulse pattered, and his face felt warmer. He looked up into Lance’s glassy eyes, feeling tethered by them, as he was slowly growing getting used to being frozen by just a single look. Feeling, for a moment, comfortable and understood, in a way that he knew painfully well that he would miss once he returned home.

“Hey,” Lance told him then, softly, wavered with emotion, “Thank you, for… for everything. I know you stuck your neck out for me, and I didn’t make things easier… but… you’re a good person. I’m glad that you were the one who came to get me when I died.”

No one had ever told Keith that they were happy to meet him before. No one had ever left an interaction with him feeling better about themselves than they would have had they never spoken to him in the first place. Keith licked his lips, caught on a hundred responses that couldn’t ever amount to anything that he felt in that moment.

Lance’s fingers laced between his, and gradually, achingly slow, he pulled Keith into a loose, warm embrace.

“I hope I can see you again,” Lance told him, “I hope we get more time in the afterlife.”

Keith didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d forget. He didn’t have the nerve to explain to him that he’d move on, he’d explore a heaven that Keith had never been brave enough to move on to. He’d live in an exotic, mysterious paradise, and surely, over time, he’d never think about the sad and sorry reaper who brought him there ever again.

But it felt nice to be held. And Keith thought about that song, the one playing in the waiting room.

_ “I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day, in everything that’s light and gay. I’ll always think of you that way.” _

And he held Lance, for a fraction of a moment too short. He imagined a world where the two of them could meet as people. Where neither of them had died too soon.

He thought that Lance would be funny and he’d flirt too much, he’d smile when he should have been crying. He’d try to be strong for the both of them. And Keith imagined that he, himself, would unfold like a flower blooming on the first warm morning of spring. His petals would be tender and untouched, but Lance had gentle fingers. They’d be happy, maybe, in their endless summer. They’d be young and dumb and they’d never think that death would ever tear them apart.

It was a silly fantasy about a person who he barely knew.

But he mourned Lance, as did many other people that day. And he felt, as he finally took him by the arm and led him through the doors to the waiting train station, that he was doing himself the biggest disservice by not holding on for just a little bit longer. By not saying anything to Lance about how important he was, how much he’d meant and how much he’d changed things before it was already too late.

As Lance passed through the doors, as he stumbled towards the train, Keith watched him go silently. He lingered in the threshold long after the train rounded the tracks, long after the smoke dissipated in the wide, blue endless sky.

He’d never see Lance again, after that. In dreams, in memories, but he’d never feel the warmth of his skin, the pleasure of that gaze holding his ever again.

But for a moment, he imagined that himself and Lance, in another universe, could have been happy.

_ “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.” _

 

* * *

 

In the current day, Keith and Lance sit together on a curb just outside of the newly built apartment complex. Lance’s arms are wrapped around his chest, his knees pulled tight against himself. He’s been staring long and hard at the street in front of him, shivering slightly in the muted cold, but so still and unresponsive as Keith finishes his story that Keith almost compares him to his former comatose state as he’d led him through the doors to the single car of Allura’s train.

But once he finishes, he pushes out a deep breath. He leans back with his hands pressed firmly on the sidewalk behind him, craning his neck to the sky and watching the cloudless gray of it. He imagines that today is the day of Lance’s death once again—how clear and pristine it had been, how it should have been raining instead, for how awful he felt about all of it.

Keith counts the moments and the fretful heartbeats slowly calming in his chest. He’s told Lance a lot more than he asked for, divulged information about his own feelings that perhaps are even more inappropriate than they were that day. He isn’t positive that Lance is even interested in him, especially after getting to know him. Especially after Keith’s learned how bad he is at accepting Lance’s honest, awkward affections when so often he can only react with an unpracticed, clumsy coldness.

He can’t imagine that Lance likes him very much anymore, but he’d thought, as he was talking, that Lance should understand, at least, how much he impacted Keith before he moved on. Before he chose to become a reaper, and Keith himself was so surprised by it that he could barely react when Coran dragged him into his office.

But finally, after a long moment spent in silence, Lance speaks.

And it’s definitely not the first question or accusation that Keith was expecting to hear.

“So, wait—” Lance’s round and red-rimmed eyes are boring into him now. Keith forces himself to maintain a straight face. “Did I really hit on you in the hospital?”

Keith can’t stop himself from smiling, just a little. He bites off the end of a laugh that almost escapes him in his surprise. He pushes himself back forward, resting his hands in his lap, and he looks away from Lance to the tall buildings just across from them, and the snow falling gently down to the ground from the gray sky.

“I think you were trying to lighten the mood,” Keith tells him, “You were trying to make me feel better even though I was the one who was being shitty to you.”

Lance is quiet again. Keith doesn’t look at him, doesn’t spare him a glance or even a shred of consolation. He watches the slow fall of the snow and the few cars passing in front of them on the street. He wonders how Lance might feel now, knowing how he died. Knowing that he got some semblance of closure, at least, for a moment before Allura stole it away.

Keith himself suspects that he died in a similar way, saving someone. Shiro has dropped enough hints about it over the last few hundred years that Keith would be an idiot if he didn’t start paying attention to them. If he thinks about his wounds and the general time of his death, he imagines that it could have been a bomb that he’d thrown himself on. It could have been a plane, blown up, or something terrible and violent that could have torn him limb from limb.

He tries not to think about it too much. He’s always imagined that the answers would make him feel more awful than he already feels.

After meeting Lance, after reuniting with a version of him that couldn’t remember a single prior conversation, he couldn’t stop himself from musing about it often—the idea of being happier after forgetting, the concept of being better off not knowing. He’d spent many hours mulling over the fantasy that maybe someday Lance would remember the impact that he’d had on him, how substantially he’d changed Keith’s life for the better, but gradually, Keith could feel him slipping away.

He could see him talking to their peers during breaks, he could feel him growing only more distant, more of a stranger, less of a person who meant the world to only Keith, to someone who belonged, instead, to everyone else _ but _ him.

He felt like an idiot for being so possessive. But often, when he’d witness Lance laughing and chatting so much more casually with other people than he ever could with him, Keith resisted the urge to pull him away, to bare his teeth and snarl,  _ “He’s mine and only mine! You have a ton of friends, but he’s my only one!” _

He almost laughs, thinking about it now.

But suddenly, Lance’s voice pulls him from his thoughts again.

“I still had good taste back then,” Lance tells him, “I guess I really did choose this fate for myself just because I was attracted to you. You know, I had a feeling that I was dumb enough to do something like that.”

He laughs—not short or clipped or miserable. Not dry or weighed down by his sadness. His laughter now is open and happy, maybe even sardonic. Maybe even freer than it’s ever been before.

And his hand, when it finds Keith’s shoulder, is tentative, non-invasive and soft. Keith’s eyes snap back to find his, and for a moment, he’s lost in the sea of being seen completely, just as he had been that day, so many months ago.

“I’m still glad that I met you,” Lance says then, “But… you were wrong.”

And lips, warm and velvety and so close, press against his. Keith has never been kissed before, as far back as he can remember. Keith has never felt so comfortable being this close to another person, as he feels right now, kissing Lance.

In the small gap between them when Lance pulls away, his voice is timid and quiet and barely there.

“I’m glad that I found out. I’m—I’m happy that you were the one who came to get me, that—that I helped you, because…”

Another kiss, and Keith’s watch beeps. He doesn’t know what he’ll tell Shiro when they get back. He can’t even remember how behind schedule they are at this point, but he doesn’t care.

Lance’s lips, his voice, his hands, they’re warm and gentle. It feels cozy and familiar, being so close.

And his words, so dipped in affection and need and hope that Keith feels as though he might melt, just from hearing them:

“I like you even more now than I must have back then.”

He never would have thought that being this happy was even possible.

But he thinks, finally allowing a small laugh to escape him, that if anyone were capable of making him feel this way, it’s definitely Lance.


	9. Finial

The final week of Lance’s training period ends anticlimactically. That’s not to say that it isn’t enjoyable—with the looks that he’s caught Keith giving him, the lingering touches that last just long enough that people around the office start to whisper about them. With the way that he’s learned to make Keith smile, and how much easier conversation between them has become.  

Keith has begun to tell Lance about what he knows of his past. He tells him that he doesn’t know where the golden marks on his skin came from, how he might have died to earn them, but he doesn’t know if he ever wants to find out. He tells him that he suspects that he died heroically, that Shiro must know, as the reaper who collected him, but he’s never been brave enough to ask.

And Lance knows that Keith is learning how to be happy now, because Lance, himself, is learning how to be happy as well. The two of them, having spent so much time dancing around the prospect of a relationship—pointedly ignoring the persistent, popping electricity of unspoken feelings that have fizzled between them since before Lance can even remember—have finally found common ground.

Keith is still frequently grumpy, especially in the mornings and when they’re running late. And sometimes he switches out the hot chocolate that he often brings Lance during long days of work with black coffee, just to mess with him. The plant next to Lance’s desk hasn’t grown or shrunk, but it hasn’t started smelling bad either. Lance still isn’t sure when or how he’ll ask about it, how he’ll admit that he dumps the contents of unwanted drinks into the planter when Keith isn’t paying attention, but he knows that they have time for many uncomfortable and awkward conversations later on. He knows that, for the rest of eternity, they’ll be free to have all of the arguments and heated discussions that they might ever need to.

The future looks long and endless and daunting, but it’s bright.

And now, an entire month after Lance started training with Keith, and even more since he first found himself standing in this office on the very first day, Lance is proud to announce that his trial period has ended. He’s an official reaper now, and surely, he’ll get an office of his own.

Keith barks a laugh when he reaches the last part in the boastful, windy speech that he’s currently giving on the matter.

“You think you’ve earned your own office, huh?” He asks, “Too bad Shiro told me this morning that you’re stuck in here with me for now.”

He’s leaning against the front of his desk, one palm flat on the surface. The other hand is holding a mug of steaming coffee close to his lips, and he takes a short drink as Lance fumbles to figure out if he’s more excited or disappointed.

Sure, the promise leaving Keith and moving somewhere where he can’t admire him daily was saddening. The concept of having to come up with excuses to see each other during work hours wasn’t something that he was particularly fond of. But the hope of being taken seriously as his own person, the idea that he could have a nice office by himself seemed far too magical to pass up when he’d mulled over the pros and cons. The idea that maybe, someday, another new reaper would wander in and share some part of the experience that he had on his first day here with Keith, he’d romanticized the image of that in his fantasies so terribly that now, saying goodbye to it feels as though he’s mourning the death of his own brainchild.

He already feels embarrassed to admit that he’d been hoping for some kind of graduation ceremony. He’d been thinking that, at the very least, he’d get a nice diploma to hang on the wall, or the white hooded God herself would come in to congratulate him. Maybe they’d have an office party or maybe he’d be allowed an extra fifteen minutes on his lunch break—any semblance of a reward would have worked just fine. He isn’t picky. He definitely isn’t asking for the world here.

But he wasn’t offered more than a firm clap on the back from Shiro this morning, an offering of one of the doughnuts in his familiar cardboard box from the mess hall, and a few soft, proud words that had felt warm and fuzzy like summer sunlight dancing over his skin.

And Keith, now, is smiling at him, which if he’s honest to himself, is really all that he needs. Keith’s grin is subtle and barely an upturning of the corners of his lips at all. His cheeks are finely splashed with a dim shade of pink. His fingers drum against the surface of his desk as he takes another drink.

“At least you can decorate your space now that you know that you’re gonna be here for good,” Keith tells him, “It looks pretty depressing as it is.”

Lance takes a moment to glance around the desk at which he sits. It’s definitely scarce as far as any customization goes, but he’d never even considered that covering it with personal touches was even an option. It’s true that they sell many silly little knick-knacks in the commissary, but he’d never given them much thought. He’d always imagined that Keith would judge him if he picked out one of the feathery little novelty pens or the birds that bob up and down as though they’re drinking water. He’d always thought that buying a binder covered in glittery stars or sparkly ocean water would earn him a judgemental look from Keith, that maybe he’d pull Shiro aside later and tell him that their arrangement just wasn’t working out, Lance wasn’t taking the job seriously enough, it wasn’t meant to be.

But now, when he thinks about marking this space as his own when he considers that he can pick out anything that he wants to make his little corner desk feel more like a home away from home, it’s exciting. And privately, he can’t wait until the end of his shift so he can take a trip down to the solitary supply booth, just off of the corner of the mess hall, with Hunk to pick through everything that their commissary store has to offer.

But another issue is pressing, as he thinks about this. His eyes travel over to Keith’s end of the room—the barren desk, the few things littered around that tell nothing of the person who he really is. Lance still hasn’t figured out if the books are his, or if they simply belong to the company. He doesn’t know if every room has its own surrealist fern, existing in a Schrödingeresque, transient state of being, or if Keith pilfered it from somewhere else.

He scrunches his eyebrows, resting his elbows on his desk and his chin on his threaded fingers.

“Don’t tell me that you actually  _ decorated _ your side of the room to look that depressing,” he says, and when Keith chokes on his coffee and immediately balks, Lance is overjoyed to find that he’s struck a chord.

Keith sets his coffee cup down just a little bit too hard, but thankfully, even as Lance prepares himself to wince as the heat of it speckles over Keith’s skin, it barely elicits more than a small pause from Keith. He shoves off from his desk then, drawing nearer, stalking forward with squared shoulders an expression so sour that Lance has to remind himself that this man is no longer his boss. He might still have some pull with Shiro, sure, but Lance has a feeling that Shiro wouldn’t take him too seriously anyway, given the numerous times over the last week that he’s caught Keith and Lance just a little bit too close for two totally innocent and platonic employees to be.

Shiro suspects something, definitely. And he surely wouldn’t take Keith’s word alone without thinking that perhaps he’s only complaining because Lance insulted his stupid, boring office space.

But as Keith presses his hands on the surface of Lance’s desk, as he leans forward and thrusts his face so close to Lance’s that Lance has a whole lot of trouble not leaning up and kissing him, it’s also apparent that Keith isn’t posing much of a threat here. Lance still has yet to push him over the edge of annoyance into genuine anger, but he has a feeling that something ugly is lingering just beneath that pretty surface. And he prays, for his own sake, that he never personally unleashes it.

Keith might be gorgeous and soft and narrow in the most attractive of places, and he might be kind, privately, and sort of his boyfriend now, but he doesn’t think that he could survive the blistering heat of his anger more successfully than any other sorry sucker who might push him just a little too hard.

But now Keith is closer, and coherent thought is proving to be a lot harder than it was just moments ago when he was still across the room. Lance drags his gaze from the paperwork in front of him, across the glossy oak of his desk, up Keith’s fingers tapping against it, his long, outstretched arms, his broad shoulders, the dip of his soft and ivory neck into the collar of his crisply ironed shirt.

And right into his eyes—the most dangerous place, Lance thinks. The endless deep and dark pools that he could potentially get lost in forever.

Keith’s lips are moving, which is even more dangerous, somehow. His voice is honey even when bitter and clipped and even as his cheeks flush deep scarlet. He’s telling Lance now, low and quiet as though anyone outside might be able to hear him, “If you hate my workspace so much, maybe you should come with me later to pick out some decorations.”

Lance, without thinking, without worrying about how clumsy and unpracticed the works come as they tumble from his lips, says, in response, “L-like a date?”

Keith’s lips curl at the edges. There’s a twinkle in his eyes that Lance has never noticed before this week. His posture relaxes, the tenseness in his shoulders easing out as he goes slightly slacker against Lance’s desk. He seems almost weak in the knees at the sound of Lance saying those words. He seems almost as transfixed on Lance now as Lance has felt by him every waking moment over the last few months.

Lance knows from Keith’s stories that he was interested in him too—that he still is, even after everything that they’ve been through. He knows that Keith agonized over sending him away, that he was kept awake at night mulling over just how awful of a thing he’d done when he’d accidentally convinced Lance to stay.

And he knows that Keith, now, is surely excited about the prospect of spending time together. As facts, laid out before him, these things make sense in the most technical manner possible. But emotionally, in his heart, he still can’t believe it. He still has trouble understanding what a total heartthrob like Keith would possibly see in someone like him.

But Keith’s smile is tentative, almost shy. He bites his lip for a moment, flicking his eyes from Lance’s face to something just over his shoulder.

“There aren’t a lot of good places to go on a date around here,” he says, “But maybe we can eat after. I haven’t eaten in the mess hall in a really long time.”

Lance’s responding laugh is throaty and rough. He’s having trouble not pushing himself up and grabbing Keith by the cheeks. He’s finding it nearly impossible not to drag him over the top of his desk and trap him in his lap. He isn’t sure if Keith knows that he’s adorable any more than a dog begging for table food might know it. He doesn’t know if Keith really understands the power that he holds over him at all.

It’s only been a week since they started this _ thing _ , whatever it is. Since Keith started talking to him, telling him things that he remembers from before Lance was even born in the living world. Since the two of them started connecting on a level more personal, and they’ve finally, after all this time, started getting to know each other. Since it started being okay for Lance to reach forward and touch Keith, to kiss him if he wants to. Since he wandered back to the dorms and Keith showed him his room, since Keith spent the night with Lance in his.

They aren’t making a point of keeping anything a secret, and he knows better than anyone that everyone around them, surely, caught on very quickly when things started to get more serious. But it’s hard, he finds, to stay quiet when he’s somehow managed to score someone as beautiful, as charming, as all-consuming and possessing and absolutely perfect as Keith. It’s difficult to keep his hands off of the guy even when they’re supposed to be doing real work.

Lance settles instead, since feasibly he knows that grabbing Keith and hauling him over his desk will probably end in all of his things in the floor and a foot in his face, to reach forward and rest of one of his hands on top of Keith’s. This grants him Keith’s full attention yet again, and he wavers under the weight of it for a fraction of a second.

He still hasn’t gotten used to this whole “my hot, unattainable boss is kinda dating me now” thing, and he definitely hasn’t gotten the hang of looking Keith directly in the eyes without feeling like he might float away, but now, as Keith looks at him, he tries his best to regain his bearings before things start to get too weird.

Finally, Keith speaks again, but it’s softer this time. He’s still watching Lance’s fingers laying over his own, seemingly caught in some thought that Lance would love more than anything to hear all about right now. In his imagination, Lance allows himself to believe that Keith might be struggling not to lace their fingers together. Or maybe he’s considering forgetting all about their work for the day and sneaking back to the dorms instead. Sure, they’re already on some fairly thin ice after their little rendezvous the other week—when it had taken them an entire three hours after their shift should have ended to catch up with all of the cases that they’d missed while they were too busy talking then… kissing. But he imagines that maybe Shiro, at least, has forgiven them for that little infraction by now.

And they’re short-handed as it is, he reassures himself. What’s the point of being the hardest worker in the afterlife if Keith can’t take some well-deserved breaks from time to time?

But, instead, Keith steers the conversation back to work. Lance isn’t particularly surprised by that aspect of the conversation, but he can’t say that he was expecting the second part of it.

“Well, I’m supposed to keep an eye on your progress today, so… if you do well, maybe I’ll come back to your dorm after our date tonight.”

Lance can’t stop the sly smile that spreads over his lips, or the way that one eyebrow dips, just as the other raises higher up. He leans in slightly, slipping his fingers between Keith’s just as he’s been wanting to all along, relishing the cute way that Keith’s cheeks darken, how his eyes widen, how he bites his lip as though it’s taking every ounce of his willpower not to pull away in embarrassment.

“So what if I mess up today?” Lance asks, betting everything on Keith’s bluff now—knowing entirely too well that Keith will probably end up in his room no matter what happens.

Keith is quiet for a moment before he pulls away. He pushes back off of Lance’s desk, turning curtly and making the short journey from Lance’s workspace and back to his own. He pulls back his sleeve and checks his watch underneath it. He flips through a few files before pulling one up. And after makes his way around his desk, after he pulls a clipboard from one of the drawers next to his tucked-in chair and clips the paper to it, he turns back to Lance without looking at him.

He pats his breast pockets until he finds his pen tucked inside of one. Casually, seemingly without much thought, he tells Lance, “If you do a bad job today, I’ll have to arrange a private meeting with you in  _ my _ dorm so we can go over all of your mistakes.”

Lance spits a laugh. He definitely didn’t think that Keith would fire back with something so suggestive, and for the life of him, he can’t decide if the punishment might actually be better than the reward. But, no matter what, if the night will inevitably end with Keith lying in bed with him, he can’t say that he’s dreading all of the work that lies ahead of them now. If only, he thinks, he’ll be able to reap the rewards later on.

So he pushes himself up from his desk as well, organizing the paperwork that he’d finished filling out long before they even started this conversation. He’s nervous, thinking about doing everything on his own for the first time. He doesn’t know if he’ll be any good at it or not, with Keith simply watching from the sidelines and not navigating them through the city as he often does.

He’d shown Lance, just a few days ago, how to communicate with his ticker. He’d instructed him through the steps that he needed to take to have the information pertaining to his jobs fed into his thoughts. Lance had made an offhand comment about tickers being nothing more than fancy and far more convoluted cell phones with built-in GPS, but the look of confusion that Keith had sent his way then had informed him, better than any words could, of just how behind the times Keith really was.

He’d realized, as he’d waved off Keith’s confusion with nothing but a few quiet excuses, that it really didn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things, if Keith knew about cell phones or not. He can’t imagine that there might even come a time when knowing how to use a phone might benefit them in the afterlife, but privately, secretly, he’d relished the prospect of knowing something, finally, that Keith didn’t.

And maybe, eventually, he might sit him down and explain all of the new technology, if only so he won’t ever forget it himself. If only so he can hold tightly to that last remaining shred of himself that he still remembers—that he must have been good with phones, with computers, with the changing times, because the encyclopedic knowledge of such things in his thoughts is vast and detailed and complicated. He still wonders from time to time what he might have been studying in college. He still wonders how close he might have been to earning his degree.

But it’s easier now, not knowing. It’s easier to accept that this part of him is gone, faded away, erased and replaced with whatever he is now, whoever he might choose to become over time. That he might never know the Lance McClain who Keith met, but now, as a blank slate, as a new man, he can become someone even better.

Keith is waiting for him just outside of the closet door now. Lance checks himself to make sure that everything is in place. He pulls his pocket watch from his breast pocket. He draws in a deep breath as he watches the hands ticking from number to number, as he remembers how Keith had taught him to activate the portal in the closet. How, at first, it had seemed daunting and scary and almost impossible, but the more that Keith allowed him to practice, the more comfortable with transporting them he’d become.

In one week, he’d learned how to do so many things that had confused him before. In just a few months, he’d learned to accept the reality and the fate that he’d chosen for himself, without even remembering.

He steps forward, closer to Keith. His heart stutters in his chest.

And he reaches out, wraps his fingers around the knob, and opens the door.

 

* * *

 

Lance’s first job of the morning is fed to him by a frankly unnerving level of information that feels more like his instincts urging him to move than actual thoughts conjured in his head. These feelings, Keith tells him dutifully, will be easier to understand once he gets used to them. Lance cuts him off with a humorless bark of a laugh and a hand raised quickly in the air before he can delve into another short speech about how “things will get easier, he promises” before it sours his otherwise good mood this morning.

It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the sentiment, and it’s not that he feels like Keith isn’t anything but right, but the words are just getting a little stale now. And as much as he agrees with them, there’s a part of him that dreads the day when the novelty of these situations and new discoveries finally fades away. A monotonous life isn’t something that interests him at this point in time, and he wonders if a version of himself a hundred years from now might still find new things in life to hold his attention.

He hopes so, at least, before Keith prods him in the side with the end of his pen, urging for him to keep moving and stop getting distracted before they run out of time.

His job today is to reap the soul of a middle-aged man who died in his sleep. There isn’t an exact cause of death available to him, and there aren’t a lot of helpful details that he can comb through his thoughts to find. He remembers Keith’s advice before—to find something solid to latch onto in order to convince the souls under his care to move on, but this guy seems just about as blank as they come.

He doesn’t allow himself a moment to feel bad about that, and spends his time, instead, fiddling with his watch in a helpless attempt to convince it to feed him more information. It isn’t as straightforward or easy to navigate as clicking buttons on a phone, Keith had told him in far less specific terms. It’s more about envisioning what you want before you touch it. It’s about being clear and concise with your thoughts and urging the ticker to relinquish the right information.

So he pictures himself flipping through a solid file, like the one that he’d had on the guy back at the office. He pictures himself finding the perfect clue that might allow him to convince this guy to move on without anything particularly horrible or inconvenient stopping him.

His ticker offers nothing helpful. In his mind’s eye, he can see the guy living alone. He can see him watering a single house plant half dead in front of an open bay window. Both parents, still alive. No siblings or cousins or grandparents that he was particularly close to passing before him. Not a dog or a house cat, or even a friend. Lance clears his throat, tapping the surface of his pocket watch just a little bit more firmly than before. His brain conjures up the image of a pretty woman, dropping a pile of files at what appears to be a small, ill-lit office. He can see the man helping her collect her things, but there isn’t a lot of information beyond that. There are cartoon characters chatting animatedly on a television in the dark. There’s a child making a mess of its dinner in the tray of a hard plastic high chair. There’s the blurry expanse of a tile floor, an arm reaching forward and lifting his view to a toilet bowl.

Retching, sickness. Lance closes his eyes. He shakes his head, feeling an unrest on his own belly as he forces that last scene to stop.

These are all memories, he knows, but they aren’t offering him any useful clues. He isn’t sure if he just isn’t very good at this yet, or if all of the reapers, Keith included, have seriously managed to convince a single person to move on with this feeble amount of data.

As he messes with his watch, he leads them towards a place that his instincts are telling him must be right. He can see house numbers clearly in his head—1016 Harmony Drive—and the front of a small house with an unkempt yard, with chipping white paint, and a mailbox barely held to the base with rusted screws. He begins to look at the clues that he’s been given: the child that appears in only early memories, but no mother, no woman to be seen or heard from in any picture that he can conjure. He thinks about the sorry state of the yard, of the house itself, of a man clearly sick and barely conscious pulling himself up over the bowl of a toilet to throw up.

An alcoholic is what he thinks first. He almost asks Keith to specify, to give him some hint as though he could somehow be seeing the same things that Lance is right now, even though he isn’t even looking at his own ticker. Even though he’s doing nothing but following behind and taking short notes at random intervals that make Lance feel somehow even more on edge about all of this than he already did.

He scratches his head, taking a few slow, calming breaths as he reminds himself that he still wants to prove to Keith, to Shiro and everyone else, that he can do this without help.

He compiles a personality for the guy—a backstory befitting such a depressing, quiet ending. An alcoholic whose wife must have left him with their child. A guy with no family, few friends, who generally keeps to himself. He drinks in excess. He spends his lonely evenings watching the cartoons that he must have once watched in the morning with his child before something happened and someone took that child away, too. It takes every ounce of Lance’s self-control not to allow his sympathy to overpower his critical thinking. He knows that the guy will be happier in the afterlife—he has to be. He needs to convince him to move on, to give him the opportunity to find out.

This isn’t the kind of person who Lance could imagine becoming a reaper, and he doubts that he’ll ever be given that kind of opportunity, but… maybe Heaven is better, at least. Maybe whatever lies beyond their universe will be kinder to him than Earth ever was.

He continues to tap his ticker, continues to skim through the fleeting snapshots of memory that flicker through his head. He can tell that they’re getting close now, that it’s only going to be a few more minutes before they reach the guy’s house, and he wants to be as prepared as he can be. He wants to do this right, without Keith’s help. He wants to prove that he’s fit for this job, that Shiro and Keith and the white-hooded God didn’t make a bad call when they granted him this position in the first place.

“It’s right here,” Keith tells him, stopping him successfully with those words as though they’re more of a short leash that he’s tugged suddenly to still him, “He’s just died, too. We’re right on time.”

Lance pauses for a moment, shaking his head to chase away the remaining images that flicker through his thoughts. They don’t offer any images that prove or disprove his theories, and he wonders if Keith had really worked all of these jobs on instinct alone. If maybe he’s really gotten so used to this over time that the limited amount of intel doesn’t even bother him anymore, and how helpless and confused he must have been the very first time that Shiro took him out on a job, just as he’s doing now, with Lance.

He looks to the house, which is even more dilapidated now than it was in his memories. He wonders how long it’s been since the guy has really looked at it, since he’s taken in the disarray in which he’s leaving his life, and if he might regret not taking better care of his things just before the white-hooded God erases his memories.

Maybe sometimes, Lance thinks, wrinkling his nose, forgetting is better. Maybe, if he were in this guy’s shoes, he wouldn’t want to carry the image of this unhappy home with him into the afterlife either.

He clicks his tongue, shoving his hands into his pockets before trudging through the overgrown grass in the yard. Keith rounds behind him, taking a longer path over the cracked sidewalk, mindful of the weeds overgrown and spilling out through the gaps in the concrete as he continues scrawling whatever notes he must be making about Lance on that clipboard. Lance isn’t sure if his eagerness to get this over with is a good thing or not. He doesn’t know if it might look better to their superiors if he had just a little bit of outward trepidation, but he trusts Keith to give an honest review.

He almost knocks on the door, before he catches himself. Instead, he phases through it, wondering why Keith went through the trouble of opening it so many times before—if it was for his benefit, for the sake of offering the small comfort of something familiar that might have fooled him into believing that the world around them was something that they actually existed in, or if Keith secretly got his rocks off for the theatrics how Lance has privately suspected that he just might.

That thought doesn’t linger for too long. It’s pushed out by the repulsion that he feels when he’s suddenly faced with the state of this man’s house. The carpets—once fluffy, outdated white, he believes—have been weighed down with dirt and spilled drinks. They’re matted and flat now, stained dark in places, pulled up and curling yellow in others. There are large pieces of wallpaper peeled from the glue on the walls. Dirty dishes fill the single sink in the kitchen to his right as he steps deeper into the living room, and he’s thankful, for a moment, that all of his senses are dulled to the sensations of the living world. He isn’t sure how long it’ll take for someone to discover this guy’s body after they leave with his soul, and he’s thankful that he won’t be around to witness the scene when that happens, too.

He can hear Keith taking more notes behind him. He doesn’t have a lot of time to consider just how many things he’s doing that are worth writing down, because at the end of a short hallway, even through the dark of the closed curtains and the dust particles mingling with the fruit flies zipping through the air, he can make out the ghostly figure of the man’s spirit standing just outside of an opened door.

Lance approaches without thinking. At the hint of movement, the guy doesn’t turn his head. He doesn’t jump and he doesn’t speak directly to either Lance or Keith.

But lowly, after a long, crisp whistle, he draws out, slow and bored and without much inflection, “Damn, I really am dead, aren’t I?”

Lance resists the urge to offer a laugh. He resists the urge to say much of anything at all. He doesn’t know why he expected for this to be easy. He doesn’t know what he was expecting in the first place, but it definitely wasn’t this.

The man is slack-shouldered with weathered, leathery skin. At the bridge of his long and crooked nose, he’s wearing big, thick-rimmed glasses that catch the light from the adjoining room, in front of which he stands. He’s wearing stained sweatpants and an oversized jacket that hangs loosely from one shoulder. His shirt is stretched where his beer belly presses out into it. He’s barefoot, tired. He doesn’t offer even a hint of the emotion that Lance imagines that a normal person would feel when presented with the sight of their own dead body.

Keith doesn’t offer any advice. When Lance cranes his neck to look at him, he gives no indication that this is unusual at all. But he does take another note, dotting the I or J of whatever opinion he might have on the paper before raising his gaze to look at Lance. His eyes in the dark are nothing but black dots. His brows are low but lax. He doesn’t seem any more stressed or on alert now than he usually does, and for some reason, that eases away some of Lance’s anxiety.

Lance gulps hard, turning back around. He takes another step towards the man, offering a hand in the dark, narrow hallway between them. He finds his voice, scratchy at first, and pieces together the words that he wants to say hurriedly in his head.

This is different than just watching Keith work and offering input when necessary. He feels an inkling of a feeling that he must have felt before in life—like he’s standing on a grand, lighted stage before an eager crowd, expected to say something witty or interesting, expected to entertain. He has stage fright. His hand, still outstretched in the dark emptiness of the filthy hallway, it shakes desperately. His palms feel clammy. His throat feels as though it’s been stuffed with cotton.

“Y—you need to come with us,” he says then, cursing himself privately for not using the singular, for already proving to Keith, surely, that he’s relying on his presence in some shape or form to get this job done, “Uh—you see, if you don’t—”

The man suddenly turns his eyes to Lance—to his hand first, which almost drops in his surprise, to his flushed face and his newly glassy eyes. To his quivering lips, and his shoulders that feel like they might buckle under the weight of this job any second now. He doesn’t know why he feels so afraid. This man isn’t putting up much of a fight. He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous, when in his head, when he’d run through this situation a hundred times before, he did everything right. He passed this assessment with flying colors. He didn’t choke, he didn’t ruin things, and he definitely wasn’t terrified when no real danger or trouble has even presented itself.

His hand drops. He shoves it in his pocket, his fingers tracing the edges of his ticker, as though the subtle beating of it might help him regain his resolve. He resists the urge to look back at Keith again. He tries, desperately, to find the right thing to say to move all of this along.

But the man speaks first. His voice is gravelly, worn. He seems tired even in death, even when Lance knows that he probably can’t feel much of anything right now.

“You’re death, right? Like the grim reaper? But if that’s right...” The man points a wobbling finger just over Lance’s shoulder. “Then who the Hell is that guy?”

His eyes move to Keith, who offers no response—doesn’t even look up from his clipboard, like the slimy little turncoat that he is. Lance jumps at the mention of Keith, whips around and gapes at him as though he’s capable of doing anything more than sitting there silently. And the seconds pass before things become awkward. Before Lance realizes that he truly is in this alone, and Keith probably won’t step in unless things go very, very wrong.

That thought is both reassuring and terrifying, and he isn’t completely sure which of those emotions he’s feeling more of right now.

“He—he’s my boyfr— _ boss _ . He’s my boss.”

Keith does twitch at that one, which, on some sick level, gives Lance just the right amount of cockiness that he feels his second wind coming back twofold. He whips back around to face the man, straightening his posture and fixing his stance. He’s standing more confidently now, ignoring the heat that pools his face at the mere concept of almost admitting to this dead guy, without much prompting, that yes, he is technically dating his boss.

The guy doesn’t give much of an indication that he even noticed Lance’s mistake, aside from a wry smile and a sideways glance in Keith’s direction. Lance forces his attention to stay far away from Keith, taking another step forward and clearing his throat. He pulls his hands from his pockets, resting one firmly on his hip. And when he extends the other hand, it’s to point a finger directly at the man’s chest. He grins widely, almost madly, as he imagines that he might in a situation where he feels even an ounce as confident as he’s trying to pretend now.

In a loud, booming voice that in hindsight, later on, might seem a little excessive and embarrassingly dramatic, he says, “I’m a new reaper, and you’re my first job. So please, be a good guy and come to the other side with me, okay?”

The wind is knocked out of his sails almost immediately when Keith spits a quiet laugh just behind him. Feathers ruffled, feeling positively as though he’s just ruined everything in one fell swoop, he raises his shoulders a little bit higher, his voice bumped up an octave as he adds on hurriedly:

“C-come on, I mean… the afterlife is great, okay! What’s the point in sticking around here all by yourself! When you could be—uh—you know, like… flying in heaven with angels or something!”

The guy is looking at him now as though he, too, might laugh just like Keith did. Just as Lance can tell from the muffled noises behind him that Keith is still struggling not to laugh. But instead, he offers the room beside him another forlorn look, his smile flattening around the edges as the light catches his glasses and obscures whatever emotion might be washing over his features.

He breathes out slowly through his nose, his shoulders rolling with the force of it. And when he looks at Lance, there’s sadness there, a mourning that Lance wishes more than anything that he didn’t understand.

“Is death better than this?” He asks, “Am I actually gonna be happy there?”

And without thinking, without giving himself a moment to pause, to consider his options, to think of something clever, something moving, something smart or profound that might turn all of this around, instead, Lance says the first thing that comes to mind.

Like an idiot, he thinks at first, before a smile spreads wide over the man’s lips.

“It’s like a fresh start. It’s not perfect, but it’s different. Like… a reset. You can be whoever you wanna be after you die.”

Lance’s first job doesn’t go smoothly. He makes mistakes, and he feels more naive and untrained in this moment than he’s ever felt before in his life. Than he felt even the first day that Coran dragged him into Keith’s office, than he felt the first time that Keith brought him along for a job.

He knows that he still has a lot to learn. He knows that the road ahead of him is long and daunting and endless.

But he manages to coerce a soul to the other side for the first time.

And as he watches the guy stumbling towards the white-hooded God’s single train car, Keith rests a hand on his shoulder.

“You did a good job,” he says, not looking at Lance, but instead at the rolling smoke, dissipating in the air, and the wheels of the train rounding the tracks as the whistle cries, as it lurches forward, as Lance’s first soul takes his leave to the other side, “That thing you said, it was good. Smart. You used your instincts, and it worked. So… I think you’re gonna be good at this.”

It’s no fanfare and it’s not a parade. It’s not a graduation party or a big, warm hug, but Keith is smiling. Keith is proud of him, he can see it in his eyes, in the flush on his cheeks, in the way that he smiles as he pulls away.

Lance isn’t sure how many more times he’ll have to do this before he gets used to it. He doesn’t know how long Keith will join him before he’s expected to work on his own. He knows that they have four more souls to reap before they’re expected back at the office. He watches as Keith pulls the first page from his clipboard and slips it to the bottom of the pile, before dropping the latch down over the top again.

The next few might be harder. They might be scarier and sadder, or more difficult to understand. He might stumble more than he already has, and he’s sure that he’ll only embarrass himself more, the more he flounders, the more he tries his hardest to seem as practiced and at ease as Keith always used to.

But Keith, at the very least, is proud of him now. So he’s off to a good start.

He knows that no matter what happens, even if he fails terribly, his night will still end with Keith there to comfort him or congratulate him, and to pull him close in the privacy of one of their dorm rooms.

And he decides, as he follows Keith from the grand, hidden door back into the busy train station, that the promise of Keith in his bed tonight is definitely the best reward that he can think of.

The morning sun sits high in the sky overhead, casting a yellow glow through the wide windows that catches in the dust particles in the air. He can feel the subtle warmth of it on his skin, can smell the food from the cafeteria, can hear the booming chatter of a hundred conversations vibrating all around him. His ticker is humming with information about his next case. Keith is writing something down, barely paying attention as he walks just a little bit ahead.

And Lance feels, at this moment, as though he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be, for the first time since he died.

 

* * *

 

The setting sun between the daunting black buildings of the city encasing them casts a sparkling orange glow over the melting snow strewn about the street. The ravens cawing somewhere off the distance mingle their harsh, grating calls with a cacophony of city sounds—the honking of car horns, the chattering of passing people, the music and the footsteps and the whir of tires against the slippery asphalt of the road.

Lance cups his hands in front of his face, blowing warm breath over his frigid fingers as Keith finishes scribbling notes on the file currently fastened to the top of the pile on his clipboard. Lance watches the people wandering down the sidewalk across the street. He raises his head and follows the black silhouettes of circling crows against the pink-scored sky. He breathes in the crisp air of late winter, wondering exactly how many days have passed here since he died. Wondering where his family is, and what they might have been doing to fill their time since he was torn so violently out of their lives.

In his chest, his heart still aches for what feels to him now like nothing but indecipherable shadows: the blurry faces and muffled voices of almost-memories, the feelings, more than images, of people who he used to know. In his dreams, he’s visited by snapshots of early breakfasts and big dinners. Phantoms of people and wisps of memory that he can barely grasp before they float away. And sometimes Keith is there, too. Sometimes Keith is a passing face at a coffee shop. Sometimes he’s a smile and a laugh, and a warm hand threading through Lance’s hair, keeping him grounded in the reality in which he currently resides.

His insides feel pulled tight. He feels as though he’s dirty laundry, wrung out and cleaned. Like now, after all this time, he’s finally learning to rid himself of the ill feelings and just live, now, with the understanding that he isn’t who he used to be anymore. That maybe, as this new version of himself, he wouldn’t recognize his family if he saw them. And maybe they wouldn’t recognize him either—not the person who he’s become. Not the Lance who he’s grown over the last few months to be.

He still doesn’t understand it, not completely. He still wonders what the meaning is, why people live to die. Why humans are born, often, just to suffer. But it’s easier now, with Keith. It’s easier to accept the inevitable confusion when he knows that he has someone to keep him company when his stormy thoughts won’t let him sleep.

“You’re thinking really hard about something.” Keith’s voice is closer now, as he reaches out to rest a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “Do you hate crows or something?”

Lance smiles, coughing a short laugh and tugging his gaze away from the circling crows. It lands, instead, expectedly on Keith. And it takes a moment to find the air again within his lungs to breathe, for his scattered thoughts to compress themselves into words that he might be able to speak in order to explain himself.

“I was thinking about you,” he says, “About why we’re here, why we died too early, why we had to forget, and… About how it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Keith’s small smile immediately softens. He turns his gaze to the icy sidewalk between their feet.

His hand drops from Lance’s shoulder. He tucks it into his pocket and allows his head to tip back, for his eyes to focus on the birds, on the sky, on the dark tips of the buildings against the light of the setting sun.

“It still matters,” Keith tells him, “We might not understand it, but it matters.”

Lance watches Keith for a moment, watches the way that his hair hangs over his eyes, how the shallow slopes of his jaw into the apples of his cheeks are stained pink from the cold. How his shoulders are slacker now, the tension that Lance had once grown accustomed to completely eased away. He watches how Keith drops his head down again, how he pulls the clipboard closer to his face with both hands as though inspecting it, and how finally, after a few short heartbeats, his eyes meet Lance’s once again.

“If you wouldn’t have lived the life that you did before I met you, you probably wouldn’t have decided to become a reaper. If you hadn’t died when you died, your niece probably would have died instead. I don’t know why we have to die at all—why we die so soon, too. Or why we forget. But since some parts of life and death have meaning, since there are reasons for other things, I guess there are reasons for  _ everything _ , right? Maybe we don’t get it, but Allura gets it. So… maybe we just need to stop worrying about what the reasons are. Maybe we just have to worry about being good people, since… we can control ourselves. Maybe that’s… what really matters—not what happens to us, but… what we do about it.”

For a moment, neither of them speak after that. Lance himself isn’t sure what to say in the face of Keith, of all people, giving him the exact words that he realizes that he needed to hear. And Keith, cheeks growing hotter, snapping his eyes back to the clipboard as though he hasn’t inspected it three or four times already.

“I—I mean… I don’t know. I guess that’s a stupid thing to say, but—”

“No, no it’s…” Lance turns completely now, facing Keith. He can’t stop the wide grin that spreads out over his lips, can’t stop himself from reaching forward and grasping Keith by the shoulder. “It makes sense, and… I agree. I think you’re right.”

He pulls Keith closer, crushing the clipboard and Keith’s slack arms against his chest.

“I can only control myself, right?” he asks, smashing his face into Keith’s hair, “So I’m going to focus all of my attention on being the best boyfriend in the entire afterlife, got it? When someone thinks ‘good boyfriend’, they’re gonna think ‘Lance McClain’—my picture’s gonna be under the term in the dictionary, I’m gonna be  _ that _ good!”

Keith’s laughter is muffed against his shoulder, but slowly, his arms rise to rest against Lance’s back. The clipboard clacks as it meets the back of his suit jacket, but Lance doesn’t mention it. It feels too nice to be warm now, to find himself encircled in Keith’s arms. To smell the freshness of the soap long since dried in his hair, the aftershave from the locker rooms, the smells that should be so familiar that he doesn’t even notice them anymore, but somehow, they always smell so much better on Keith.

“You’re so corny,” Keith tells him, laughter evident in every muffled word.

“But you like it, right?” Lance asks, “I mean, you were so wooed by my smooth words back in that waiting room, weren’t you? Hook, line, and sinker, I had your heart from that moment on!”

They bicker playfully as they untangle, as Keith smooths out his suit and the papers on the clipboard, as they begin the journey from the belly of the city back to the other realm. Lance talks to Keith about all of the decorations that he wants to buy for his half of the office. Keith laughs at him, argues when he begins talking about investing in a bean bag chair and a lava lamp. They fill the time, the silent cracks between the noise of the city, and the cold air all around them with their soft conversation.

His hand, at some point, finds Keith’s, and their fingers lace together.

The sky fades from orange and pink to a deep, thick navy, before black. They pass through the portal, and it’s evening even when they return to the other world.

Keith doesn’t even get a chance to finish telling him that he did well for his first day before Lance is pulling him forward into a kiss. Hands and lips, warm bodies easing off the cold in a well-heated, empty office. Two dead men finding meaning in an afterlife that only continues to pose question after question, but never any answers.

Keith, beautiful and proud and quiet. Keith, kissing him back.

And Lance, feeling alive all over again:

Giddy in love, and ready, for the first time that he can remember, to begin living the rest of his eternity in the afterlife.


	10. Epilogue

Keith is already sitting on his bed when Lance locks the door. He’d paused only to glance back and forth down the empty dorm hallway, as though either of them is up to no good. As though any of Lance’s neighbors would even notice or care if they witnessed him bringing Keith into his room for what has to be the 10th time since they got together.

At times, he wonders if things are moving just a little bit too fast, but Keith never seems to mind. Their relationship has moved from kissing to touching to many long nights spent tangled together in the sheets at what feels like lightning speed, but he knows that Keith has existed in the afterlife for a very long time. He knows that it’s already been months since he, too, passed away and awoke in this building, in this strange, eternal universe. And there are hundreds, thousands of years still ahead of them. They have all of the time in the world to grow even closer. There are centuries rolling out ahead of them, promising him, at the very least, that before either of them finally decide to retire and move on to the afterlife, that they’ll have experienced the most fulfilling relationship that the “in-between” can offer them.

It’s a little scary, to think about it like that. To consider that there still might be a day when all of this eventually ends. They’ll have lingered here for far too long, grown bored and despondent with everything that reaping, that half-existing, and that staying in this realm has to offer them. He wonders if Keith will move on without him first. He wonders if he’d ever dream of moving on without Keith.

But Keith, now, is saying his name. He’s asking many questions with just that single syllable, resting his head against his shoulder, spread out on Lance’s mattress and reaching out to him with his eyes alone. It’s reminiscent of a lot of Lance’s past fantasies, and the sight of Keith laying, wanton and so totally at ease on his bed is enough to make his head spin.

Lance turns to him slowly, smiling softly and ignoring the warmth that roves over his skin when he drinks in the sight of Keith, finally, splayed out on his bed as he’s imagined him, and now experienced him, many times before. Keith, true to his imagination, looks much nicer among the sheets and the pillows than any of those models on the Abercrombie posters ever could. In the dim, orange-cast glow of the overhead light, the shadows of his thick eyelashes cast short lines down the apples of his cheeks. His eyes themselves are dark now, hooded and low. And if Lance squints, he can make out the slightest hint of pink against his skin, the eager flush, the embarrassment and nervousness that’s still new and terrifying and so electrically charged between them.

He decides that Keith needs to be a little bit less dressed right now. He decides that he, too, needs to slip into something a lot more comfortable. Preferably nothing at all.

He takes a moment to shrug his jacket from his shoulders. He allows it to drop to the floor, knowing that he’ll regret it when it’s wrinkled in the morning, but right now, he can’t find the will to worry about it too much. Keith watches him as he fiddles with the buttons of his shirt, but he doesn’t make a move to undo his own. Lance knows that, secretly, he has to enjoy the feeling of someone else undressing him. He knows that Keith is still getting used to the sensation of being touched. He knows that it’s been centuries since anyone has reached out and run their fingers over his skin, held him close, or treated him with the same gentleness that Lance has begun extending to him as of late. He knows that Keith drinks in all of his fleeting touches. He knows that he relishes these moments when the two of them can feel and be felt by one another, when no one is around to witness them as they pull each other close.

He knows that, even though he’d never imagine admitting it out loud, Keith likes the physical side of their relationship just as much as every other aspect of it, the motions that Lance goes through to prove that he cares about him, and all of the new and invigorating possibilities that come along with making himself vulnerable in the presence of another person.

Like undressing him. Like kissing him, from his lips, down to his throat, to his chest. Touching every inch of the skin that he exposes when he pulls Keith’s clothes from his body and discards them, forgotten, on the floor. And even if Keith might often shirk away when he touches the golden death marks, so dark and thick and vibrant against his skin, Lance knows that he’s getting used to feeling beautiful too. To accepting, after all of this time, that perhaps Lance loves him fully—scars and all.

And Lance can’t deny that he’s quickly becoming addicted to how precious he feels when he’s under Keith, as well. Keith has a way about him, of holding Lance as though he might suddenly slip away. Of kissing him every time as though it might be the last time. Lance finds himself often swept up in the moment, brought near tears by the intensity of Keith’s quiet affections, feeling like a diamond crushed from stone, beautiful and cherished, something worth looking at as though he’s more priceless than anything else that the universe has to offer.

He has a lot of trouble not telling Keith that he loves him, already. He might have come to terms with the unfortunate fast pace of his own feelings sooner than Keith himself might have even started feeling it, but he’s determined that this one thing needs to be timed perfectly. He can’t just go yelling it out in the throes of passion. He can’t just tell Keith that he wants to spend his eternity with him while they’re walking from the train station to his next job. He loves Keith enough that he wants to make it special, but special, he’s found, isn’t a luxury that they’re often afforded now that they’re dead. There isn’t such thing as filling out a request form to vacation in the living world. They aren’t given more days off than their Saturdays and Sundays, and their free periods after the end of their shifts. His eternity might be spent forever chasing that quintessential opportunity, but more than anything, he wants Keith to understand that he’s too precious to spill his feeling to when the stars have yet to align, and every facet of their situation hasn’t been laid out thoroughly for the most optimal “love confession” experience.

Keith, now, is still watching him. He’s reached out his hands, rolled over on his belly on the mattress to give himself easier access to Lance’s belt. It jingles as he works it through the loops. With his shirt open and hanging from his shoulders, Lance watches with much interest as Keith works it free from his pants, pulling it away and dropping it between them on the floor.

Keith’s eyes flick up to meet his as he fumbles with the button, with the zipper of the fly. And Lance swears that he dies all over again when Keith smiles—when that tiny, cocky grin breaks out over his lips, and the color splotched over his cheeks spreads from the apples of them all the way to his ears.

“You’re already hard,” Keith says, and Lance finds that, yes, he is. He bites the inside of his lip, reaching out to comb his fingers through Keith’s hair. It’s an intimate position to be in now, as Keith pulls him from the newly opened gap in his pants. When he strokes him through the fabric of his underwear, cocking his head to the side and smiling with a slightly open mouth. Lance’s fingers bunch lightly in his hair. His eyes focus on those full, open lips.

Keith doesn’t waste a lot of time then, sending him a final, wry grin before leaning further forward and pressing his lips to the outline of Lance, hard in his boxers. The warmth and the softness through the fabric is already enough to make Lance’s head swim. The sensation of Keith’s hot, wet tongue poking at him as though trying his hardest to make Lance collapse right here and now.

Keith knows how to torture him, Lance has learned that loud and clear over the last week, since they started being more physical. He knows exactly which buttons to push now—memorized them dutifully with how often he’s made Lance squirm. And Lance suspects, deep down and long after they’ve finished, as he’s spooning or being spooned by a sleepy Keith in the dark later on, that Keith gets some kind of sick thrill out of teasing him like this.

Keith, despite seeming so shy, so wrapped up in himself, has a penchant for being cruel in the bedroom, a sadistic streak that Lance himself is still struggling to grow accustomed to.

He tortures Lance with these light, fleeting touches. Before Lance can even get used to the feeling of his mouth ghosting over him, that mouth is pulled away, replaced by a light grip of Keith’s hand, barely holding him.

Lance breathes a laugh, caught between a moan, between a petty, whiny cry of disappointment when even that subtle pleasure is gone too soon.

Keith’s eyes are focused entirely between his legs now, and he pulls himself forward, propping himself up on his elbows before sending Lance yet another cruel and sly little smile.

“Are you in a hurry?” he asks with false concern, “I don’t have anywhere to be. I could do this all night.”

Lance pushes out a heavy breath, and he can’t tell if he’s laughing or expressing concern for his own sexual well-being. He doesn’t know if he wants Keith to get a move on it or to keep sweetening the pot, if he wants to get right to the good part, or draw this out until he’s so close to the edge that everything feels all the more vibrant and intense, and all-consuming.

Because touching Keith often feels like hovering his fingers too close to a candle’s flame. Running his fingers through Keith’s hair, feeling his hard warmth buried deep inside of him, it feels, often, like he’s burning. But he embraces the sting of it, that feeling of lingering far too close to something that might someday destroy him. He can’t put his finger on what about Keith feels so dangerous—if there’s simply an air about him of an animal caged for far too long, or if Lance simply loves him too much, and someday, that love and the intensity of their nights together might grow so big that it consumes him completely.

He shudders out another breath, as Keith ghosts a long stroke from the waist of his boxers all the way down to the slit where his fly ends. He’s still watching Lance, still flipping that molten gaze back to his face at short, cheeky intervals as though testing his boundaries tonight. Keith generally knows how far to push, how far to go with these teasing touches before it becomes too much. Lance has never felt the need to tell him to just get a move on it, has always found himself just barely toeing that threshold before Keith actually carries on. He doesn’t know if he’s just that easy to read, or if Keith is just that good at reading him. And when Lance has found himself in rare moments, leading the show, he often fumbles when he tries to emulate Keith’s actions—suddenly finds that Keith is far too impatient to wait around for the teasing when he’s not the one doing it.

It might be annoying if it weren’t so cute. It might be aggravating, knowing that Keith can dish it out but is wholly unwilling to take the same treatment. If it weren’t for the fact that Lance, when he’s put in that position of power, can’t find the will to tease Keith when touching him everywhere and with every ounce of his pent-up, fervent desire always feels so much better.

But Keith, now, is taking his time. He almost doesn’t even feel the slightly cooler air of his dorm room on his skin, at the slow pace that Keith finally pushes back his boxers and exposes him through the slit. 

He’s already so worked up that he can barely find the strength to feel embarrassed, when Keith takes a moment that feels more like ten eternities just to admire the way that his cock presses out into the short space between Lance’s now softly shaking, now oh-so pliable and willing body, and his own pretty face.

Keith leans further in, pressing his lips once again to the head and turning his eyes up to meet Lance’s. Lance feels pinned under the intensity of that stare, of those dark eyes framed by thick lashes. By the pretty flush coloring Keith’s cheeks, and by those full and eager lips prodding at him as though just inviting him to push himself forward and past them. But he waits because he knows that Keith likes to have complete control when he’s in charge of things. He knows that Keith enjoys setting the speed of the pace here, that the end of all of this will be worth it if only he can bide his time now. His fingers continue to comb through Keith’s hair, catching in a few wild tangles that he makes a point of not tugging on too hard.

Keith, thankfully, doesn’t keep him waiting for too much longer. Slowly, gradually, Lance feels the sensation of that hot tongue dragging just between Keith’s lips, over the skin trapped between them. His eyebrows furrow close together, and he shudders out a long, needy breath. His fingers tighten in Keith’s hair, his legs pressing close together as he struggles with the concept of standing solidly on his own two feet. He feels dreadfully close to collapsing now. He wants more than anything to climb onto the mattress and encase Keith’s pretty face with his thighs. He makes a weak effort to beg for such a thing silently, with wide, unfocused eyes that barely manage to hold Keith’s gaze for a single second before they slide closed in the wake of the new pleasure suddenly humming through him.

Keith opens his mouth, sliding the warmth and the snugness of it over the waiting firmness of Lance’s cock. Lance listens to the wet sound of it, to the huff of Keith’s breath pushed through his nose when it reaches the back of his throat. Keith is too good at this for his own good. He’s too practiced for Lance to be his first. To Lance, who still fumbles and dithers and finds it nearly impossible to touch Keith’s naked body while Keith is watching him, it isn’t even remotely fair. It’s the greatest tragedy of his afterlife, that Keith can somehow already be so good at this while he, seemingly so much more eager and more desperate to please him, still lags so far behind.

Keith’s hand startles him when it winds around his body and grasps loosely at his backside. Lance steadies himself just as he feels his knees buckle, with his free hand on Keith’s shoulder. He feels wobbly and weightless and pathetic, but he can’t deny that it feels too good for any sense of insecurity to occupy the forefront of his thoughts. He knows that Keith has a way of pleasuring him that makes everything else melt away—be it a bad day, or a bothersome memory, or his own unkind thoughts suddenly coming to assault him. Keith, now, is moving his mouth slowly, forward and back. He’s sucking lightly every time that his lips linger close to the head, and his other hand, the one that isn’t currently pressing firm fingers into Lance’s ass, rises up to stroke at the shaft exposed each time that he pulls his head back. It’s a little stiff, given his crouched position, still on his belly on the mattress, but the sensation of it still vibrates warmly under Lance’s skin. It still feels invigorating, possessing in a way that he can’t deny, even as his legs continue to tremble weakly beneath him.

Keith’s mouth moves gradually from the shaft to the head, his fingers ghosting sensation over the wet trails that it leaves behind. For a moment, they continue on like this, with Lance just edging the threshold of losing himself in the feeling, with Keith craning himself in a position that looks uncomfortable, but seemingly without complaint as he continues to take Lance deep into his throat before pulling back again.

Finally, after a long, torturous moment of this, he moves away completely. His hand is still loosely wrapped around the shaft, his lips are wet and his eyes are heavy with need, dark under the shadow cast by Lance’s head between him and the single overhead light.

And he says, low, quiet, “Why don’t you climb on the bed with me? You look like you’re about to fall over.”

The words should be more scathing than they are, but there’s no humor in Keith’s voice. He’s all seriousness now, all eagerness and excitement for what they’re about to do. It isn’t completely unheard of for Keith sometimes to get impatient even when he’s the one dragging things out, and it seems that tonight will be another one of those nights. Lance enjoys the squirming too, sure, but he can’t deny that he’s excited to find himself completely at Keith’s mercy, beneath him. That he might be allowed to feel Keith’s mouth on him, his fingers buried inside of him, his scent and warmth and the fuzzy pleasure of him thrumming all around Lance until he feels as though Keith’s filled every empty cavern in his life. Until it feels like the afterlife is nothing but himself and Keith, locked in this tangible need for an eternity.

After a moment in which Lance steels himself for whatever might welcome him on his bed, he shudders, rubbing his hands over the fabric of his boxers on his hips before jerking forward and making a clumsy ascent onto the mattress. Keith slides back, pulling himself up to a seated position with one leg crossed inwards, one hanging over the side of the bed. He’s still dressed, still bundled in his suit and the stiff jacket, the confining pants. And Lance makes a point of shimmying out of his own pants and underwear before he climbs up all the way, and discarding his shirt behind him on the floor as well, just for good measure. He doesn’t want to waste more time than he absolutely needs to with continuing to undress. And he definitely doesn't want to find any particularly aggressive wrinkles in his clothes tomorrow morning, creased in the fabric from whatever position Keith might choose to put him in once he isn’t coherent enough to consider the state of his uniform.

Keith watches him, and Lance moves into a position that mirrors his almost perfectly. He crosses both legs instead, and rests his hands in his lap, swallowing his embarrassment as his wrists and arms do little to mask his cock, still standing at eager attention, now unconfined and unobstructed by any meddlesome clothes. Keith’s uniform doesn’t make things quite as obvious, and he doesn’t have the nerve to stare long enough to look for any hint of a tented firmness between his legs. But Lance likes to believe that maybe it’s hidden under there anyway, if Keith’s pink cheeks and glassy eyes are any indications to go by.

For a moment, they sit still. Keith watches him, and Lance stares back. Lance feels suddenly put on the spot, even just between the two of them. He feels as though he should do something interesting or entertaining to deserve the way that Keith’s eyes are roving over his skin, but his mind feels muddied and hard to navigate as he considers what sorts of options he might have. He wants for his hands to not be empty right now, for one thing. He’d like for them to be on Keith’s naked skin. But Keith is wearing his clothes still, and he doesn’t look as though he’s going to try to undress any time soon. He seems comfortable watching Lance, completely stripped bare, as he assumes the position of imaginary power over him, as he seems dominant now, fully dressed, appropriate as Lance’s bare skin catches the chill of his room and raises goose pimples. As Lance sits here, looking like an idiot, still hard, and Keith offers no comfort or touch or any indication that he might reach out and ghost his hands over Lance to warm him up.

But Lance knows that Keith can be awkward too. That right now, despite how desperately his brain is trying to tell him that Keith is toying with him, the reality of the situation is that Keith himself is probably just as lost as he is.

So he scoots forward, without thinking much. It’s a breach of their silent contract for one of them to jump from submissive to dominant when the other has chosen that role for the night, but Keith doesn’t seem even remotely annoyed when Lance draws near and places his hands at the edges of Keith’s suit jacket. If anything, Lance can see relief washing over his expression, and he takes a moment, as he pushes the jacket over Keith’s shoulders and shoves it down over his arms, to wonder if perhaps Keith belatedly realized that there wasn’t a graceful or sexy way to get naked once he’d allowed that opportunity to pass him by earlier.

Honestly, Lance wouldn’t be surprised. Over the last couple of weeks, since they’ve gotten together, he’s learned that the vast majority of the behavior that he’d initially read as aggressive or dismissive in Keith was actually caused by an awkwardness and aloofness in social situations that he wanted more than anything to rid himself of.

If only to still his own rampant nerves, he concentrates on unbuttoning the buttons of Keith’s dress shirt. They come apart easily, revealing just the slightest sliver of Keith’s milky skin beneath, and the further that he pulls them apart, the further down that he goes, the more evident the gnarled, golden scars sparkling over the surface become. He barely regards them anymore, considering them to be no more an anomaly to Keith than the nose on his face, the shaggy, unkempt hair hanging over his eyes. But Keith’s breath hitches regardless, his hands coming up to rest loosely over Lance’s wrists, without encircling them or putting the sort of pressure on his skin that might stop him.

Keith is watching Lance’s hands, his fingers pressed into the final button of his shirt, when Lance raises his gaze to look at him. His eyes are focused hard on the buttons, on the slivers of gold and white mingling together on his skin. Lance can feel his hands shudder against his wrists. And a moment later, less than a single heartbeat, he’s bridging the gap between them and pressing his lips to Keith’s. Then, to the corner of his mouth, and trailing short pecks along his jaw.

“You’re gorgeous,” Lance says, “All of you. Every part of you.”

Keith breathes a laugh—warbled and shaky, quiet and unsure.

“Look who’s talking,” he says, and while Lance’s cheeks feel just a little bit warmer, he doesn’t offer a response, or an argument, or any indication that he’s heard Keith at all.

The last button comes undone easily. Without looking, he drags his hands over Keith’s firm belly, noticing no indentations where the scars lie, but feeling as though maybe he can still feel them—the warmth of them, the buzzing of rebirth that must have, at one point, mended him together again. His hands push the fabric from Keith’s shoulders, just as his lips find his throat. And Keith pushes out a long sigh, dropping his head back, mapping his fingers over Lance’s wrists and up his arms, until he’s resting both on Lance’s naked shoulders.

“I’m supposed to be in charge tonight,” Keith says, all breath that Lance can feel vibrating in his throat, “Am I gonna have to fight you for control?”

Lance’s laughter is stifled against the dip of Keith’s shoulder. His fingers graze over Keith’s chest, one hand lingering over a nipple before pinching it between two fingers. He drinks in Keith’s small gasp, opening his lips just a little, just enough to bare his teeth, before biting down gently. That elicits another small noise, which he revels in just as greedily. And for a moment, it seems as though Keith might just allow this to happen. But Keith’s hands drop seconds later, and they move over him blindly. They’re mimicking Lance’s motions almost perfectly, his nails blunted and twinging in just the right way when they dig into Lance’s skin.

“I—I just wanna kiss you for a minute,” Lance says, hot breath on skin, body trembling as Keith’s other hand drops down to ghost along the eager head of his cock.

Keith allows this to go on for a little while longer, and Lance relishes the opportunity. He still teases Lance with his fingers, still ghosts that almost-pleasure over his head before pulling his fingers to cruelly away as soon as Lance tremors, or bucks just a tiny bit too excitedly. And Lance knows that he’s only testing how determined Lance is to keep kissing him. He knows that he could put an end to this if only he’d stop being stubborn and just let Keith touch him like he wants to touch him.

But it’s hard when Keith is so pretty and so soft and warm. It’s hard when he’s finally allowed to touch every part of him that tortures him day after day in a very public office where anyone could walk in if they were desperate enough to mess around in there.

So far, they haven’t done more than kiss at work. Shiro pretends that he doesn’t notice the redness of their cheeks or how messy their hair is when he accidentally stumbles in on them. He’s taken to knocking too, just before he opens the door, which Lance values more than Shiro could possibly comprehend. If he weren’t so brainless right now, he might consider picking through the commissary in search of a fruit basket or some other nice gift that he could send the guy’s way, just to show his appreciation.

As it is, he can’t focus too hard on any future plots to sweeten his boss to the idea of him and Keith not being able to keep their hands to themselves while they’re on the job. He can barely even remember his own name as Keith’s hand encircles him, pumping lightly. He definitely can’t find the will to care about work, or what their co-workers might think, or if anyone actually knows what’s going on between them. He can’t concentrate on worrying about any of that right now—on anything but how nice it feels to press his teeth into Keith’s skin, how sweet the tiny noises that he breathes out sound as they hum in his ears. And how wonderful and awfully muted the sensation of being touched is when Keith is making such a point of giving him just enough pleasure to frustrate him into submission.

He can’t say that he’s particularly attached to the idea of being dominant tonight. Most days, he doesn’t care either way. But he’ll miss being able to focus long enough to drag these sounds from Keith. He’ll miss being able to touch him without faltering in his own onset of pleasure, to put his fingers to Keith’s warm skin and make sure that he knows that he’s beautiful. That he’s every bit as perfect as Lance has spent the last few months reminiscing hopelessly.

Keith’s grip tightens just a fraction, just enough to send a flurry of sensation skittering like electricity over Lance’s skin. He hasn’t moved enough to obstruct Lance’s own slow journey along his shoulder, and he hasn’t given any indication that he’s growing impatient, but this single, innocuous gesture is enough to send Lance’s resolve crumbling.

It’s enough that he props his head against Keith’s shoulder, whining the most pathetic, defeated excuse for a moan that he’s ever heard in his life, before dropping his hands from Keith’s chest to hang limply between them.

“F-fine, fine, you win,” he says, clipped and breathless, barely coherent even in his own ears, “God, Keith—y-you fight so dirty.”

Keith’s laughter is soft enough that Lance doesn’t feel immediately offended by it, and when he pries Lance gently away from him, his eyes are dark and hooded, but soft.

“I just want to touch you too,” he says, “Is there something wrong with that?”

He kisses Lance then, as though to cut off any argument that Lance could possibly be sentient enough right now to conjure up. Lance feels boneless in his grasp now, as Keith steadies him with one hand on his shoulder, the other still working hot waves of pleasure between his legs. He wants nothing more than to fall back and find Keith on top of him, encasing him in his warmth and softness and the giddy, dizzy feeling that he often finds himself lost in during these fleeting moments alone with Keith. But instead, much to his surprise, Keith falls back instead, pulling him by the shoulder until he’s positioned on top. He’s careful to move Lance in a way that doesn’t hurt or feel uncomfortable, and the transition from sitting to crouching on all fours over Keith feels strangely fluid, even though Keith never releases his hold between his legs.

They kiss, and Lance opens his lips to welcome Keith’s tongue, gliding against his own. He bucks a little into Keith’s hand, begging for him to pick up the pace, pleading for an increase in this sensation since he’s been so good, so accommodating to Keith’s need to do whatever he’s trying to do right now. And Keith doesn’t reward him with that, no, but by, instead, sliding downward, still underneath him, until his face is level with Lance’s cock, and his mouth wastes no time swallowing it once again.

Lance gasps, dropping his top half downward and cupping a hand over his open mouth. It catches the brunt of the moan that threatens to slip past his lips—too loud even for the solitude of his bedroom, too throaty and whiny for poor Hunk, just a wall away, not to hear it.

He’d like to continue being friends with Hunk in the conceivable future, and he knows that having loud sex in the middle of the night probably isn’t the most reasonable way to continue that relationship.

Keith takes him deep into his throat, taking advantage of this more convenient position in a way that makes Lance’s entire body feel as though it’s vibrating. He feels tethered to his body now in a way that he rarely feels in the usual day-to-day. He feels concentrated entirely in the place just between his knees, where Keith’s mouth and that talented tongue work over him. The world is his tiny bedroom under the orange-cast of his overhead light. Then it’s just himself, in his quaking body, and then the place where he’s connected to Keith, cock to mouth, pleasure and the slow build of a fast orgasm, that’s cut off only when Keith pulls back abruptly and tilts his head to the side.

“You’re not tapping out this early, are you?”

Lance’s response is nothing more than a blubbering, slurred and strangely enunciated moan. He can feel it rattling through him, can feel his brain scrambling to pick up the pieces of where his thoughts must have cut off when he was last aware. But he’s coming up blank, empty-handed, and terribly stupid. He curses Keith, with the last remaining coherence that he has, for asking him anything after doing something like that to him. He had to have known how powerless Lance can get during times like these. He has to realize that it’s a dirty trick to expect anything literate to come out of his mouth after he’s just experienced the Earth-shattering pleasure of one of Keith’s spectacular blowjobs.

He tries to say as much, but after a moment of struggling through the syllables, he settles instead for, “Sh-shut up, ass.”

Keith seems to get the picture just fine anyway. He pushes out a short breath, lifting one of Lance’s thighs just high enough that he can scoot out from beneath him. He sits up then, stopping only to admire the way that Lance is still propped up, ass high in the air, face half-buried in the mattress, before pulling himself off of the bed and making a straight line for Lance’s nightstand.

Lance concentrates on catching his breath as Keith tugs open the drawer and digs through it. He can hear the jingle of Keith’s belt hitting the floor and the more subtle whoosh of the fabric of his pants dropping along with it. He isn’t sure if he should stay in his current position or not, or if he’d even have the capacity to adjust himself, given his current state of incompetence, so he stays in place. As embarrassing as it might be when his thoughts are clearer, he knows that Keith likes seeing him splayed out like this, desperate in pleasure, eager to continue. He knows that Keith is enjoying this maybe even more than he is, considering just how much he enjoys getting Keith just to the brink of begging as well.

He listens absently to the sound of a cap popping open. To the sound of something papery tearing apart. He knows what’s coming very soon. He knows that things are just about to go from amazing to absolutely perfect. He readies himself mentally for the feeling of Keith’s hands finding him again, finds that he misses them terribly even though they’ve only been gone for less than a minute. But he figures that he spends most of his days being touched by Keith a lot less than he’d like to be. He spends the vast majority of his time waiting for the next opportunity to find some time alone with him.

So it makes sense, and it’s fair enough, that he’d been hungry for as much of Keith as possible now that he’s finally been given the chance to touch and be touched by him alone, with no risk of another person stumbling in and interrupting them. It’s not like anyone knows it, aside from Keith himself. And it’s not like Keith has ever given him any indication that he isn’t just as excited for these nights spent together, given the fact that neither of them has slept in their room by themselves since the first time that Keith brought him back to his dorm.

He can feel Keith’s weight sinking the corner of the mattress, and he sucks in a quick breath. His cock stands ever-harder as a hand reaches out and rests just at the cleft of his ass, and the moments that he waits, as Keith shuffles forward and situates himself behind him, feel as though they’ve lasted a million years all in a total of five seconds.

Keith’s lips press gentle, warm kisses up his spine, all the way up the small of his back. Lance flinches at the feeling of something slick prodding just between his cheeks, sliding against him in a familiar way that sends another wave of fuzzy pleasure humming over his skin. It teases at him for a moment, pressing against him as though it might not even be considering slipping inside. Lance resists the urge to push back against it, to force it inside before Keith’s ready. He wants this badly now, wants to feel the girth of Keith filling him, stretching him, shoving deeper and harder inside until he loses the last threads of coherence. But he knows that Keith takes his time with this, with this very specific aspect of sex.

He likes to make sure that Lance is totally ready, that it won’t hurt. And while Lance appreciates that the next morning, while he admires Keith’s self-control when he doesn’t feel any discomfort when he wakes up and gets ready for work, he can’t help but wish that maybe, just right now, he’d stop being such a considerate and caring boyfriend and just get a goddamn move on it already.

He says as much through a throaty keen that rumbles through his throat. It’s muffled against the sheets, but he can feel Keith’s mouth pull away from him at the sound of it. His hand, moments later, slides from its new resting place on Lance’s hip and winds around him, bumping against his cock blindly before reaching out and grasping it.

“Be patient, Lance,” Keith says with hot words against Lance’s sweaty skin, “Just let me get you ready.”

A long stroke glides up Lance’s cock, lubricated and amazing, stalling his thoughts just long enough that Keith manages to slide a finger inside of him without further complaint. Lance arches his back at the feeling of it, his eyes slipping closed, that sensation of being tethered to a place and not a person returning tenfold. Right now, he feels emptier than he’d like to be, but he doesn’t have the motor skills to express that. Especially, he finds, when Keith grasps him firmer, pumping him in time with the slide of his fingers over Lance’s prostate, maddening, enthralling, and just as wonderful as he remembers it.

His toes curl, and his fingers thread harder into the sheets beneath him. He gasps something that might just be a moan, might be Keith’s name, as he loses his resolve and shoves back against Keith’s finger. Keith, in turn, prods another inside, pulling both out then shoving back in steadily, scissoring them slowly and carefully as though he really doesn’t know if Lance can take just this or not.

Two become three, and Lance is writhing. He’s almost begging, torn between thrusting forward into Keith’s fist and pushing back against his fingers. His face feels as though it’s been engulfed in flame, as though he’s burning in a kiln in his self-imposed prison of sheets that hold heat entirely too well for his well-being right now. But he can’t find the strength to move or to care, to notice it more than a small, fleeting thought that’s snatched away by another wave of pleasure as all three of Keith’s fingers rub over that spot just inside of him that finally pushes him over the edge.

He’s babbling now, louder than he probably should be. Keith doesn’t have the free hand to shove over his face, as he has sometimes before, but he does click his tongue. He does take a moment, as he pulls his fingers out, to tell Lance, “Your neighbor is going to hate you tomorrow if you keep making noise like that. I’m surprised he hasn’t banged against the wall yet.”

Lance finds that he wouldn’t mind getting banged against the wall right now, but he has a feeling that’s not what Keith meant. It’s proving a lot harder to think rationally than he should right now, but he pays it little mind. Keith is pulling himself up straighter, as straight as he can be as he continues to stroke just between Lance’s thighs. And something bigger, softer and more exciting than fingers is pressing against him now, breaching, achingly slow, inside of him, before Keith pushes a sharp breath through his teeth. Before he’s cursing quietly, bracing a tight hand against Lance’s hip that hurts, just slightly, in all of the right ways.

Lance feels himself being filled. He feels all of Keith sliding inside of him, taking his time still, but edged with an impatience that Lance feels tenfold, thrumming with the nerves and the pleasure and the desperate need that skitters in his chest, all the way down to his belly. Keith moves after a fraction of a moment, careful even as he offers his own quiet moan, gradual and too slow and soft to be nearly enough, but Lance lets him take his time. He lets this scene draw out as long as he can manage, barely hanging on to the tattered edge of articulate, human thought.

Keith draws almost all the way out before shoving back in. He continues this slow rhythm for a few thrusts, timing the stroke of his hand to match with the moment that he glides over all of the best places, as though he’s really so in tune with what feels good for Lance that he’s able to plan this so accurately. Lance, again, has trouble lingering on that thought, and he has a feeling that he’ll be far too embarrassed to discuss it later on, but he wonders how much of his behavior Keith really pays attention to. He wonders how easy he is to read, and how many hours Keith has spent thinking about their private time that he’s been able to figure this out.

But soon, Keith picks up the pace. He’s breathing tiny noises now, growing clumsier and less practiced as he seems to be chasing the growing pleasure within him, as well. Lance finds that he likes it a lot more when Keith forgets to be considerate. He likes the feeling of being dragged, unwittingly, along with Keith’s pursuit of his own end. It might be the sole idea that his body has brought Keith to orgasm, the idea that he’s attractive or comfortable enough to unravel Keith when he’s done no more than lie here and feel the full spectrum of human pleasure. But Keith is thrusting harder now, quicker and less spaced out. He bends himself over Lance, encasing him in a heat so intense that Lance feels as though he’s been dropped into a pit of fire. But it feels as good as it doesn’t, the discomfort, the pleasure, the pain. They’re all the same thing now, as Lance feels himself quaking under the weight of it. As he cries out, shudders, as he shakes so hard and rattles off a long, drawn out and whiny moan that sounds louder than anything he’s ever heard before.

He cums then, with that sound, with the thought of Keith buried inside of him, his hand shaking on Lance’s hip, his mouth pressed hard into his back. He cums over Keith’s pumping hand, his closed knuckles, and the hand slides away almost just as fast, as Keith, himself, bites out a low rumble of a groan as Lance feels him shudder inside.

He knows that Keith wore a condom, and he wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling amused by that—the fact that they offer them in commissary, as though anyone could get sick or pregnant now that they’re dead, and the idea that Keith cares so much about the inconvenience of clean-up that he’s willing to put one on every time.

But, for now, he thinks about how warm Keith is on top of him, how soft and how nice it feels to be held by him like this. Keith catches his breath gradually, slumping back and off of him, careful as he pulls out, before falling back onto the mattress. Lance eventually picks himself up, just long enough to turn around and drop down right next to Keith, laying over his extended arm and rolling close enough that he can straddle him.

“You’re so noisy,” Keith says breathlessly, half-open eyes staring up at the ceiling as Lance twitches next to him, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole hall heard you.”

Lance buries his face in Keith’s shoulder, cheeks hot, head swimming as the last tendrils of his orgasm ebb away.

“It’s not my fault that it feels good,” Lance snaps quietly, resting a hand on Keith’s chest and drawing a few small, slow circles in the center of it, “If you want me to be quieter, stop making it so good.”

Keith’s laugh is short and shocked, flustered in a way that makes warmth swirl in Lance’s chest. He turns then, wrapping his arms around Lance and pulling him closer, resting his chin on the top of Lance’s head.

“I never thought that you’d be loud when I used to imagine this kind of thing before.”

Lance’s rebuttal is too muffled by Keith’s skin to sound like much of anything, but he holds Keith just a little tighter, in hopes that his sudden death grip might express his distaste just fine. Keith laughs again, another brief and quiet one before he buries his nose in Lance’s hair.

“It’s not bad,” he says, “I’m happy that you’re different than I imagined. You’re better like this, as you. Than some… stupid version of you that I could have come up with.”

Lance tips his head up, resting his chin at the crook of Keith’s shoulder and staring at the wall opposite to his bed without really seeing it.

“I didn’t think that you’d be so gentle,” he admits quietly, a soft smile tugging at his lips, his arms loosening around Keith before rubbing indecipherable shapes over his back, “I’m glad too, that you’re different than what I thought. You’re better too.”

Keith kisses the top of his head, and his breath feels foreign, strange as it hits Lance’s hair. Lance memorizes the feeling of Keith around him—the bend of his flat belly into the sharp edge of his hips. The feeling of his thighs, so strong and firm and warm, framing Lance’s side.. He enjoys the sensation of Keith’s breath fanning over him, the smell of his skin. The smoothness of him even marked by so many scars.

They lie together for a while until Keith finally untangles them just long enough to clean up and turn off the light.

In the few moments that he’s away, Lance learns to miss him all over again.

And he realizes, with a profound rush of emotion hitting him like ocean waves lapping at the shore, that for the rest of his eternity, he’ll only have to miss Keith in moments.

He doesn’t know what lies beyond the grand doors. He doesn’t know much about Heaven or Hell, or the distant afterlife that’s promised to reapers once they’re ready to retire.

But he knows that it feels nice, being wrapped in Keith’s strong arms.

And maybe, for now, forever, that’s enough.

Maybe that’s all that he’ll ever need any more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here we are, at the very end! Thank you so, so much to everyone who took the time to read to the end, and to everyone who left kudos and comments! 
> 
> This epilogue has a kind of funny story behind it, and it’s that my exchange partner is actually a very good friend of mine. And when I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to include sex at the end of this as my person alluded to on their sheet, she told me, “You should go for it. Just do it.” So, of course, I was determined at that point. 
> 
> So I really hope that you guys enjoyed it! It’s been a really incredible experience, publishing these chapters daily and seeing how many people have actually been able to keep up! It means so much to me that anyone did, and I can’t even begin to express how much I appreciate it.
> 
> So, until next time, thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Happy Halloween!

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland)


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